This essay was the recipient of the 2017 Mises UK Essay Prize. The author would like to thank the Ludwig von Mises Centre for their consideration.

“America is addicted to oil”

So said President George W Bush, echoing a contemporary cover of The Economist, in his State of the Union Address on January 31st 2006.

Although President Bush’s speech was a lament for the fact that the United States is the world’s biggest consumer of oil (reaching 19.4 million barrels per day by 2015), this candid admission by the architect of American interventionism lent support to the notion that his country’s forays into the Middle East have been either wholly or mostly motivated by the desire to have a greater, physical control over oil. In this essay we will, however, conclude that this theory is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst, false and misleading, and that America’s interventionist efforts can be best understood through the explanation of three distinct, yet connected objectives:

To maintain the petrodollar system and the global reserve status of the US dollar;

To appease and promote the interests of the US’s biggest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia;

To serve as proxy wars against Russia and China and to contain and minimise Sino-Russian influence in the region.

All of these objectives are subsumed by the greater, overarching aim of preventing the outbreak of a multi-polar world and maintaining a US hegemonic international order. As we shall see, any part that the physical control of oil has to play in this picture owes itself to aiding the achievement of this final objective and has little to do to with America’s appetite for gas guzzling.

Austro-libertarian and other free market oriented economists focus their efforts on explaining the inefficient and destructive nature of the state – how this compulsory aegis of taxation and redistribution retards economic progress and the standard of living, siphoning off ever more productivity into vast bureaucracies that control and regulate every aspect of our lives with a fine toothcomb. The state represents an enormous concentration of wealth and power which could never be attained by a private individual (or even an institution) in a genuine free market, a degree of power and wealth that seeks to extend its destructive influence not only within the territory of the individual state itself, but also overseas with armies, navies and air forces and all of the fire power of destructive weaponry that they can carry.

To any one individual the state can seem like an awesome and overwhelming entity – in the UK, it provides your banking infrastructure, your healthcare, your transportation networks, educates your children and supposedly is the guardian of your health, safety and wellbeing from greedy, unscrupulous companies who might seek to defraud or injure you. Moreover, if you get on the wrong side of the state then its uniformed police force can arrest you, its judges in long black robes can imprison you or freeze your assets and, of course, it promises to do the same to all of the people who attempt to commit a crime against you. And who could not fail to be overwhelmed by the state’s vast and impressive buildings such as the Houses of Parliament or the US Capitol, and the patriotic, flag waving ceremonies such Presidential inaugurations which inspire a turnout of millions?

This essay will in no way dispute the fact that the state is something to be feared (and indisputably so when we consider that the world’s entire nuclear arsenal is sufficient to destroy it tens of times over). What we will explore here, however, is the fact that the monopolistic and overreaching nature of the state is both its source of power yet also its Achilles’ heel – that the state is far from a lean, mean fighting machine and is in fact bumbling, bloated and altogether rather stupid.

First, the state is severely handicapped by its very nature as a monopolistic force. Because it does not need to compete in any areas in which it decides to wade it has a natural tendency to languish in laziness and inefficiency to a degree which renders it extremely vulnerable. For example, the global cyber attacks on state owned and some private computer networks and infrastructure last year are a testament to this. These attacks were made possible by the fact that the operating facilities of the targeted organisations – which included Britain’s National Health Service – were outdated and hence highly susceptible to such attacks. Most private consumers of information technology, on the other hand, had had the necessary patches and updates installed. This reliance on out of date technology seems endemic, spreading also to areas which are nominally private but which are heavily supported by the state such as banking. According to entrepreneur Simon Black (who started his own bank when he got so fed up with the service offered by established banks), the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunication or “SWIFT”, which is the premier global financial network, uses Windows Vista as its platform– an operating system which Microsoft no longer supports. Domestic infrastructure seems to be even worse. In the UK, most salary and business payments rely on the BACS network which dates from the 1960s and still, in our age of instant communication, takes three days to transfer funds between bank accounts. How is it possible that vast organisations such as Britain’s National Health Service and SWIFT are basically using technology that is more outdated than that available to any private individual who recently bought a laptop or smartphone? The answer, of course, is that these organisations are simply shorn of any competitive reason to innovate or to stay ahead of the game. Without the threat of losses as a result of the continual supply of tax dollars they are devoid of any reason to maintain the highest standards in order to ensure that they are efficient and up to date. Such lack of standards spreads also to the personnel in these organisations. Bureaucrats, who are more or less promised a job for life so long as the avoid making a major mistake, have little incentive to develop their knowledge and skills and so are unlikely to ever be as smart as private entrepreneurs who always need to keep a sharp eye on the game. This is one of the reasons why (in spite of all of the hullaballoo from politicians seeking election) tax and regulatory loopholes will always exist – because the people finding and exploiting them have both greater ability and incentive than those who are supposed to close them. This is not to imply, of course, that politics is not a competitive arena. However, the nature of competition in politics is very different from the nature of competition in the free market. In the latter, people are competing to create more wealth for the benefit of consumers and so it is a positive sum game – one person’s gain does not depend upon another’s loss. It is true, of course, that in a particular industry one company may prosper while others go bankrupt, and obviously there can only be one CEO of any particular company at a time. But even if a person is beaten to the position of CEO of one company the process of wealth creation itself will allow plenty more enterprises to be started in order to exploit opportunities which have not yet been explored. In the free market, one door closed is two more opened. Politics, however, is decidedly a zero sum game. The power possessed by one individual is necessarily taken from another, and money given to one set of beneficiaries has necessarily been taxed (i.e. confiscated) from another. There can only be one President of the United States or one Prime Minister of Great Britain – the process of politics will not create an unlimited number of great and powerful states in which the opportunities to become either President or Prime Minister are multiplied. Therefore, the budding politician must necessarily gain from what anyone else loses and he must make sure that no one else is able to beat him to the top job. Thus, there is seldom any genuine co-operation or betterment in the political sphere as, ultimately, everyone is the enemy of everyone else – and the only co-operation that does exist is in the form of favours, bribes and other “tit-for-tat” arrangements, with any relationships always susceptible to a sudden backstabbing by the more ruthlessly ambitious partner. With such a widespread lack of trust serving as the foundation for the state it becomes impossible for it to operate as a fast, efficient and unified whole. Indeed, private citizens can often be thankful for the fact that the little feuds and foibles between individual state departments and fiefdoms are a frequent distraction of the state from plundering the average Joe.

Second, as “Austrian” economists we know that statist intervention can never achieve anything that it is supposed to achieve – or at the very least it can only do so with significantly inflated cost. All of its publicly stated ambitions – conquering poverty, providing affordable healthcare, employment for all of those who want to work, safety and security in retirement, the vanquishing of crime and so on – will never be achieved simply because these things cannot be achieved through the means of wealth redistribution rather than through wealth creation. Indeed, because the state has no area where it can genuinely make a positive difference for the whole of society, its own natural incentive to sustain itself and to maximise its own power instils in it the desire to make problems worse rather than better – solely for the purpose of lending itself a perceived role. It is better for the state, for instance, to keep people poor so that they are dependent upon government handouts; it is better for the state to disarm its citizenry so that the latter present no threat to the state’s own armed guards, at the cost of increasing crime which the state can then step in to solve. Unfortunately this perverse incentive is fed by the fact that many people see the state’s failings as a reason for strengthening the state and giving it more power, rather than as a reason for getting rid of it. Most of the symptoms of these failings are far removed from the state itself and it requires the ability to follow a long chain of thought in order to identify the true culprit. When the government inflates the money supply, for instance, prices rise – yet it is businesses, i.e. all of those greedy, exploitative capitalists, who actually raise the prices directly and so it is them who get the blame. Similarly, when state mandated minimum wages result in unemployment the public view is that the fault lies with those same evil businessmen who are refusing to lower their profits and hire more workers. Most of this is due to the fact that the advent of democracy has severely weakened the distinction between the state and the people – the feeling of “us” and “them”. Rather, through our voting rights, all of us are the state and we are all doing what the state is doing. So, perversely, the state’s failings are perceived not its own but rather as our failings, as if it we ourselves who have failed in the particular endeavour. However, here also lies the state’s weakness. As recent secessionist movements and events within the European Union have indicated, the feeling of unity with and control of the state is severely weakened when the state becomes too big and bloated, swelling to a size where decisions are made by strange and unfamiliar figures in a city many thousands of miles away. Much of the motivation for the Brexit vote, for instance, was the desire to repatriate decision making authority from Brussels back to Britain. This suggests that the degree to which power can be removed from its proximity to the people is finite – a limit which has served as a severe frustration to the unifying, globalising and bureaucratising ambitions of political elites. Indeed, it is now unlikely that these ambitions will ever be fulfilled. Moreover, secession necessarily breaks up large states into smaller units which, as we explored in several previous essays, necessarily makes the state’s power vis-à-vis its citizens weaker rather than stronger.

This leads us onto our third point which is that the state, or rather the people who can be said to form it, are a minority of the citizenry. This is necessarily so because, as a parasitic entity, it is simply not possible for the state to be comprised of the majority. Contrary to popular belief no state has ever retained power as a result of force alone; rather, the state’s sustenance is dependent upon at least the tacit acceptance of the majority of the citizenry. Although the fear of force may constitute a reason for that tacit acceptance, generally the state has to ensure that its subjects are kept within the confines of a basic degree of contentment – that even if they may mumble and groan about the state’s inadequacy in this, that or the other, there is no pressing reason to upset the apple cart. The collapse of the Soviet communism, the Brexit vote and, we might suggest, the election of Donald Trump are instances of when such contentment with the status quo was exhausted in the minds of at least a significant proportion of the population. The end of the Soviet Union led to a markedly different political set up in Russia and Eastern Europe; we are yet to see the full consequences of the other two events. But when the people do decide to support a particular direction and to exert its independence with ferocity then the state has no choice but to yield.

This bumbling, bloated nature of the state is indicated by a joking phrase apparently made by the industrialist Charles F Kettering – “Thank God we don’t get as much government as we pay for”. Indeed, if all of the wealth and resources that the state commands were actually put to use effectively and efficiently then it would truly be a terrifying and formidable obstacle. Unfortunately, however, it is also summed up by what we might call, informally, the “cock up theory of history” – that, rather than great leaders and stewards shaping the world’s events in order to enhance humanity, anything significant that happens in the course of history is more attributable to a series of accidents and mishaps that just happen to have had widespread consequences. And it is here where the true danger of the state may perhaps lie.

One of the most infamous of these incidents occurred in 1983 at the height of the cold war when the Soviet nuclear early-warning system reported the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States. The Soviet officer monitoring the system at the time, Stanislav Petrov, believed the warnings to be the result of a system malfunction – a belief which was verified subsequently by inspection of the system. His refusal to act on the false warnings prevented a Soviet retaliatory attack which would have almost certainly elevated the cold war into a full scale nuclear holocaust. In other words, the complete annihilation of human existence was averted by the prudential actions of a single individual who refused to trust his government issued equipment. When the state today still handles so much and handles it so badly the possibility of a grave mistake going the other way is very serious indeed – and all the more so when belligerent tensions are again reaching new highs. Indeed, a not too dissimilar incident occurred in Hawaii this month when a missile attack alert was broadcast publicly, sending the citizenry into a panic for the best part of an hour – all because a state lackey “pressed the wrong button”. It is for this reason more than any other that the state should be regarded as dangerous. So much power in the hands of so few people is at risk of one them making a simple error, rather than at the risk of that same person acting with evil intentions. As awesome as the state may be we have more to fear from its stupidity than from its ingenuity.

One of the characteristics of mainstream discourse concerning political, social and economic problems is that it frequently proceeds to examine only the surface phenomena of these issues. Court intellectuals and the mainstream media apply their thoughts to just a single order of logic by concentrating only on what is front of their faces. In part this problem is the same as the one identified by Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson – that there is a perennial failure to examine both the seen and unseen consequences of a particular act or proposal. However, while Hazlitt focussed his attention on economists and economic policy, we will demonstrate here that such thinking permeates a much wider area of thought. While we will not necessarily draw any specific conclusions, we will raise some challenges to some of society’s most rigidly held beliefs and dogmas on its own terms.

Beginning in Hazlitt’s arena, the first such area we will examine is whenever someone appears on the television or in the newspaper, usually brandishing the statistical results of some “study”, in order to declare that “the government must do more to help X”. X, as it turns out, could be almost anything – the elderly in need of care; rural bus frequencies; lowering cancer deaths; children with dyslexia; conservation of trees – any kind of apparently suboptimal situation which the study and its authors have declared is in dire need of address. The particular situation may, of course, be anything from regrettable to tragic, especially when it involves either poverty, illness or death. Nevertheless the only thing that these studies and pronouncements ever achieve is to point out that we do not live in the Garden of Eden; that we live in a world of scarcity where desires remain unfulfilled and where we have to choose which of those unfulfilled desires and purposes to devote what are, at any single point in time, a finite quantity of wealth and resources. The real question we face is not whether more should be done for problems A, B or C – in an ideal world of infinite wealth we would do everything for A, B, C and every other letter of the alphabet and beyond. Rather, because we have only a limited amount of wealth and resources, our difficulty is in choosing which of problems A, B or C should receive funding at the expense of any other. If you have only one hundred pounds in your pocket and ten people turn up each demanding one hundred pounds in order to resolve all of their various ailments and hardships then it is clear that, should you be kind enough to make a donation, you can only ever satisfy one of them at the expense of the other nine. Implicitly, of course, each of these ten people is suggesting that their particular causes are more deserving than any other. Seldom, however, do all of these studies and statistical reports state explicitly why one end should be funded as opposed to another. This is not to suggest, of course, that the state does not spend an awful lot of money on things which, even from a statist’s point of view, could be regarded as wasteful. Merely that, if we accept the mainstream position that the state can improve society (as opposed to the libertarian position where the state should do nothing whatsoever and, preferably, cease to exist), the fact of a finite quantity of resources at the state’s disposal at any one time is completely ignored.

Peculiarly, however, the fact of a finite quantity of resources is tacitly recognised when considering the overall quantity of resources which should be at the state’s disposal – namely, arguments over the rate of taxation. All “soak the rich” arguments and any calls for the increased taxation of higher earners are all based on the premise that if the wealthy are allowed to keep more of their money then, consequently, there will be less money for the government to spend on healthcare, public transport, and keeping us safe from terrorists. Again, however, by examining only what is obvious in front of their faces, the peddlers of such arguments fail to grasp the dynamic (as opposed to the static) nature of economising action. Yes, it is true that if you raise taxes today then you will, right now, have a greater quantity of money to devote to whatever you think the government should spend it on. In the long run, however, such higher taxes result in a lower rate of investment in capital goods, a lower rate of production of consumer goods, and hence higher prices for those goods. In other words, the increased amount of money taken as tax revenue will be able to buy increasingly less and so the aim will be self-defeating. It would be far better to lower taxes in order to encourage investment and economic progress so that the lower amount of money taken as tax revenue could buy infinitely more than the larger quantity of money could at the higher tax rate. You are not wealthy if you possess a million pounds when the price of a loaf of bread is one million pounds; yet you are exceptionally well off if, for instance, just one thousand pounds could buy you food, shelter clothing and transport for an entire year.

The two areas we just outlined are very concentrated examples of where mainstream thought fails to think laterally – namely in regards to economic and fiscal policy. However, we can observe the same failing with regards to much wider areas of discussion. For example, it is fashionable these days for liberal elites and popular intellectuals – such as Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling – to be atheists and/or critical of organised religion, declaring themselves to be “free thinkers” who are beyond what they regard as the mindless adherence to mere superstition. The two main arguments buttressing their point of view, which are joined at the hip, is that there is a complete lack of evidence for the existence of God, and that organised religion is and has been the cause of so much suffering and oppression in the world – the latter being summed up by the popular phrase “the root of all evil”. Needless to say this evil is made all the more tragic on account of the first argument – that it is all in service of a complete illusion or fantasy. If we accept (which the present author does not) that the lack of evidence for the existence of God is sufficient to invalidate a belief in God, then yes, it would follow that all adherences to a deity and all organised religion is, indeed, ridiculous and the pain and suffering it might cause would be regrettable. However, once again this is only true when one focusses on what is in front of one’s very nose – in other words, the things that we see of religion rather than the things that we do not see from an absence of religion. Is it not the case that, beginning with the French Revolution, the struggle to fill the ideological void left by the decline of religion in the West (in tandem with the increasing faith in human reason and design in the sociological arena) has led to a degree of evil and terror far worse than that which can be blamed on organised religion? If we just look at the pure numbers then the biggest killer in history has been the thoroughly anti-religious communism, and for the survivors of both communism and all such collectivist regimes life was utterly miserable and impoverished. Of course, an absence of religion does not necessarily mean that humans are unable to attain moral enhancement through reason or reflection. However, the ideologies that have served to replace religion – having dislodged God and the will of God as their primary focus – have been shorn of any reference to what is good and what is evil other than the contents of the ideologue’s own mind. Hence, the magnitude of all creation – including every other human being who, devoid of his sanctified state as a child made in God’s image, can be safely relegated to the status of a public slave – simply becomes a means or, even a plaything, for the ideologue to realise his grand vision. In other words, the ideologue elevates himself to the role of God and it is him who now throws the thunderbolts down to Earth. Hence, the costs of pursuing these ideologies, heaped onto everyone else, are either casually disregarded – such as crusades for democracy and “regime change” – or viewed as proud achievements when they exterminate political dissenters (the Great Purges), the racially inferior (the Holocaust), or any trace of a class and culture which represented an outdated and contrarian society (the Cultural Revolution). Indeed, the arrival of secular ideologies has truly given birth to the worst type of criminal zealot – the person who commits evil when he thinks he is pursuing good. Those who perform evil deeds with the full knowledge that they are evil, however much they may revel in what they have done, might at least possess some inkling of guilt or conscience. For the secular fanatic, however, the bodies piled high and the rivers of blood neither move nor shake him – they are unquestionably necessary ends towards a bright and happy future. In some ways, however, the casual disregard for the costs and consequences of a particular crusade can be more pernicious than actively pursuing the celebration of death and destruction. For example, the secular crusade to make the world “safe for democracy” during and after World War I fostered the deeply unstable situation in Central Europe which led to the rise of further secular ideologies such as Fascism and Nazism resulting, of course, in the horror of World War II. A typical liberal intellectual today might tell you that removing Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were necessary because these men were “dictators”. Yet what he fails to consider, as the architects of interwar Europe failed to consider, is that in their own particular situations the rule of such despots was probably the least bad option, and that their removal has unleashed a whole catalogue of horrors that far exceed those experienced under their aegis. The same attitude is taken towards the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. The one line narrative, yet again, is that he is an evil dictator and so should be forcibly removed from power. Yet not only has the attempt to do so resulted in the Western support for and arming of dangerous terrorists and fanatics (the chickens of which are coming home to roost in the form of terrorist atrocities on Western soil), but Assad is supported by Russia and any collision with him risks – as a worst case scenario – war with Russia, which is a nuclear power. Is the removal of this “dictator” really worth risking the incineration of all life on Earth?

If a belief in God and an adherence to an organised religion are based upon superstitions and illusions then it is beyond the scope of this essay to determine whether or not it is, ultimately, a good thing for an individual to live his life and base his moral fervour upon such an illusion. Nevertheless, there is a strong case to be made for the assertion that secular do-gooders, blinded by their own hubris, either deliberately or ignorantly push us onto paths on which we experience far more death, destruction and misery than that caused by any inquisition – and that it may be better to suffer an inquisition based upon an illusion rather than an apocalypse based upon reality.

The final area we will consider, which is equally broad, is the type of state or government that is preferable, should we have to suffer one at all. Although libertarians would prefer for there to be no state or government, they can, of course, distinguish different types of regime as being more or less compatible with liberty. However, this question can also be asked from the point of view of the mainstream – that is, which type of regime is more likely to promote a general peace and prosperity which even the mainstream at least claims to desire? The almost universal answer to this question, by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously, is democracy. Once more, however, this belief is based only upon a very superficial analysis of what is immediately observable. Monarchies are denigrated as being “unfair” because, by pure accident of birth, specific and immovable individuals are blessed with the ability to wield the power of the state while just about everybody else is shut out from such power. Now this is, of course, true enough on the face of it – no human being should be born with any legal rights or privileges that are possessed by no other. Yet by removing such “unfairness” and spreading the ability to access state power to everybody, as we have done in a democracy, we have only served to make things worse. A king, however divinely endowed he might consider himself to be, is still one man, possessing all of the frailties and failings of one man. He personally cannot force all of his subjects to do anything at all; rather, he can only wield his power if he maintains, at the very least, the tacit acceptance of the majority of the population (and very often he need only upset far fewer to lose either his throne or his head – revolutions, rather than being the product of anger and fury among the masses, are, in fact, often triggered by the fact that the monarch failed to keep the upper crust, i.e. the aristocracy, on his side). This fact, therefore, serves to maintain a check on the extent of the power that the king can wield in practice. If he steps too far out of line – by raising taxes too high, by interfering in other people’s lives too much, or by dispensing biased justice – then he will find himself deposed. With democracy, however, all such check on the expansion of state power is eliminated because democracy not only (at least in theory) opens up the corridors of power to every citizen but also serves to offer a veneer of legitimacy for the power that the state wields. In other words, because people believe that they are choosing their leaders or choosing their policies then whatever it is that these leaders do with their power has the backing of the people and “must”, therefore, be legitimate. Needless to say, this if of course, nonsense – theft, for instance, does not suddenly become okay simply because we all band together and the majority choose someone to do all of the stealing from the minority. But the perception that it does has served to increase the growth of the state enormously, turning it into an engine of taxation, welfare and warfare that far eclipses anything achieved by a king or emperor. To take just one instance, a world populated by monarchs never managed to persuade their populations to accept worthless pieces of paper printed out of thin air in exchange for real goods and services – they only ever got as far as coin clipping. Yet a world of democracy achieved this in full by 1971 and it is this that has enabled, more than anything else, the funding of perpetual welfare and warfare, with none of the world’s major conflicts and programmes of socialisation would having been possible without it. The question we are posing here, therefore, is might it not be better to put up with one singular account of unfairness – the hereditary privilege of monarchs – as opposed to the whole, disastrous catalogue of state growth? As with all of the issues we have raised here, we are seeking not to answer this question – merely to raise it in the first place and to demonstrate that what seems to be so blindingly obvious and straightforward in the majority of mainstream discourse might not be so after all.

A difficult and perhaps insufficiently understood question concerning libertarianism is how libertarianism will be brought about in the world as we know it and, moreover, precisely what a libertarian world will look like. How can libertarians expect their theoretical understanding of their philosophy to emerge from this present world of seemingly perennial statism and how will the world be shaped once this libertarian world is accomplished? This essay will bring together a number of thoughts of this topic that have been addressed in previous essays, namely the relationship between libertarianism and wider morality, the nature and origin of law and concepts such as rights, obligations and property, and the importance of decentralisation and the relative size of state institutions, in order to try and create a unified picture of how libertarianism in theory can (or will) become libertarianism in practice.

Let us begin our examination, then, with an outline of libertarian theory and the place of libertarianism amongst wider political and moral theory. Libertarianism as a theory is concerned solely with the legitimacy of the initiation of physical force between rationally acting beings and either themselves or other physical matter of which the world is made (i.e. “resources”). Rationally acting beings are those beings who strive to attain their deliberately chosen ends through the utilisation of means, means that are scarce and can only be devoted to one individual’s end at the expense of everyone else’s. Libertarianism asks the question who may act physically in relation to a given piece of matter and who may not. It answers this question by stating that every rationally acting individual owns the physical matter that comprises his body (“self-ownership”) and all external, physical matter either of which he is the first user or of which he has received in trade voluntarily from a previous, legitimate owner (“property”). A violation of these principles – i.e. the uninvited, physical use of an individual’s person or property by another individual – is deemed to be an aggression, an unjust invasion of that which belongs to somebody else (for example, murder, assault and theft). Thus, from these core beliefs we derive the non-aggression principle to encapsulate the basic libertarian approach to all interpersonal conflicts born out of scarcity.

Therefore, libertarianism itself – to use the accepted parlance amongst libertarian scholars – is a “thin” rather than “thick” philosophy, addressing only the legitimate use of physical force. Another way of putting this is that, because everyone’s ends must be accomplished through physical actions which impact, physically, other matter in the real world, libertarianism concerns which persons may act and seek to fulfil their ends in relation to a given piece of matter, and which persons may not. Libertarianism does not, on the other hand, concern the contents of an individual’s ends or goals nor, once it is understood that an individual may act, does it have anything to do with whether or how he should act or which precise choices he should make. Libertarianism addresses neither the wisdom nor the foolishness, and neither the benefits nor the burdens that a given action may bring – merely that the choice to act in a certain way is the individual’s to make and further considerations about whether he should so act is the province of wider morality. A further way of putting this is that libertarianism deals with that which is legally permissible and may be done without response from the force of the law; it does not deal with that which is morally permissible i.e. with which behaviour is either morally accepted or morally questionable – all of which, in contrast to illegal behaviour, cannot be restrained or prevented by physical force, however odious or unpleasant. For example, I have the legal right to refuse to hold open the door for a lady; a SWAT team will not break burst in and arrest me for having refused to act in accordance with this social more. However, from a moral point of view, I have probably behaved quite rudely and in a socially unacceptable manner, meaning that such a choice was, most likely, not a good one to make. However, the choice is still mine to make and no one would have the legal right to use physical force to ensure that I hold the door open. In short libertarianism is about what I may choose to do whereas wider morality concerns what I should choose to do.

Overlooking or disregarding this important point is likely to cause a great deal of confusion. It is the mainstream view today that law and wider morality are not separate endeavours and that the law exists to enforce a positive, moral code. On the one hand the law is used to prevent us from making choices which are morally bad – past and present laws against vices such as drug and alcohol use and against various sexual preferences or adultery are a testament to that. On the other hand the law is also used to force us to act in ways which are morally good – such as the supposed charitableness, selflessness and altruism that is allegedly accomplished by the whole apparatus of the welfare state, which is funded, of course, through legally enforced tax contributions. Morally bad acts are outlawed because they are seen as bad choices to make from which bad consequences will follow and so nobody should be doing them. Morally good acts are forced because they are seen as good choices to make from which good consequences will follow and so everybody should be doing them. When a libertarian, however, then comes along and says that nobody should be legally prevented from injecting or ingesting whatever substances he wants in his body, that no one should be legally restrained from having consensual sex with whomever he wants, and that no one should be forcibly dispossessed of his lawfully earned money to be distributed to others, what he means is that people should be able to choose or to choose not to do these things – that he should have the choice to take drugs, or the choice to have consensual intercourse with a member of the same sex, or the choice to either keep or give away his own money. However, the casual observer, viewing these pronouncements through the prism of an intertwined legal and moral code, looks upon the libertarian desire to legalise acts such as drug taking as a moral endorsement of that act, and the libertarian desire to defund the welfare state as an admonishment of altruism or sacrifice while replacing it with selfishness. He overlooks or refuses to understand the fact that the libertarian is making neither a commendation nor a condemnation of these choices whatsoever – merely that the morality and wisdom of making these choices are no business of the law’s. Unfortunately, many libertarians serve to aggravate this misunderstanding by assuming that there is no further moral question concerning a particular act beyond its satisfaction of the non-aggression principle. Yes, a person should be able to, for example, say whatever words he wants on his own property without any interference from the law – but it does not follow from this fact that it is a good idea to say a particular thing at a particular time, nor does it follow that other people should not withdraw their support of you if they find what you have said objectionable. A person who takes a narcotic does not violate the non-aggression principle but it doesn’t follow from this fact that everything is okay and that there is nothing more to be said on the matter. Indeed, very bad consequences might follow for the drug taking individual and his family if he proceeds to do so and it would be ridiculous to suggest that these are irrelevant considerations. This does not mean to say, of course, that the non-aggression principle should not be primary concentration in building a just and peaceful society. Given that the violation of the non-aggression principle is so endemically legitimised by the institution that is responsible for nearly all of society’s woes – the state – it is, of course, entirely right that libertarians should persistently and consistently emphasise it. However, to view the non-aggression principle as the only worthwhile consideration would, if taken to its logical conclusion, amount to a travesty for the principle only concerns where one may act, not whether he should so act. Shorn of all other reasons to act or not to act, those who wed themselves to the principle but to nothing else would be devoid of any impetus to make one choice over the other and would, in fact, never act at all! While it is true, therefore, that libertarians in their capacity as libertarian theorists are only concerned with the proper application of the initiation of violence in society, in their role as citizens in society they must also cultivate a positive, personal morality, a personal morality that will permit the libertarian to add value to moral debates far beyond the limits of libertarian theory – while keeping firmly within his sights that none of his views are anything to do with libertarian theory itself.

It cannot be emphasised enough how embracing or understanding the very limited scope of libertarian theory affords a tremendous degree of intellectual clarity for political and moral philosophy. Theories of interpersonal ethics concern how we, as rationally acting individuals, should behave towards each other – the choices we should make that affect our own lives and the lives of those around us. It might be a good thing for each of us to give to charity and to care for one’s elders, for example. However, if theories of interpersonal ethics concern the choices that people should make, then their starting point needs to be that an individual really does have a choice as to whether he should act one way or the other. A person behaves morally or immorally if he has moral responsibility for his actions – i.e. that what he did was born out of his own free will. He does not so behave if his action was forced or if he was otherwise acting as an automaton. This fact is frequently recognised with acts that are seen to be morally bad or evil. For example, if I am holding a knife and somebody grabs my hand and plunges the knife into the body of another person who subsequently dies, few people, if anyone, would agree that I was the murderer as opposed to the person who grabbed my hand. My action was not chosen by me; it was, rather, completely forced and out of my control and thus I do not bear moral responsibility for the ensuing stabbing. Similarly, the law recognises circumstances where an individual is placed under such a degree of duress that his moral responsibility is severely compromised if not totally eradicated. If, for example, someone holds a gun to my head and threatens to shoot me dead unless I stab another person then I am relieved of moral responsibility for the resulting injury or death, at least to a degree. This relief from moral responsibility is seldom, however, recognised with moral goods. If it is morally good for me to give some of my money to the poor then I can only be said to have behaved morally – i.e. to have done a good thing – if I have chosen that act. If, on the other hand, such an action is forced – that I am, Robin Hood-style, robbed of my money and it is then given to the poor – then I have not done anything good at all. I can neither be praised nor condemned for whatever result this action will bring because the choice was not mine – I had to give up that money regardless. It follows from this, therefore, that if giving to the poor is a good thing and is, further, the hallmark of a caring and compassionate society, it is ridiculous for this giving to take place through the forced mechanism of the welfare state. When people pay their taxes to fund the welfare state they don’t give voluntarily at all – rather, the money is forcibly taken from them. The original donors therefore did not behave in any way morally good or morally bad; indeed, strictly, they did not “act” in any way whatsoever. Because they were forced to give up their money, neither care nor compassion was ever shown on their part; in fact, it is more likely they will be extremely resentful. Moral theories that allow for the enforcement of their ends through violence are therefore not really theories of interpersonal ethics at all; rather, they are theories of how the enforcing party – i.e. usually the state’s officials and lackeys – should behave unilaterally, treating everybody else as little more than tools to be wielded towards whatever ends the specific theory so desires. That’s why all socialist and collectivist theories are completely contrary to the reality of human nature – they suppress the very real desires and choices of millions of ordinary people for the benefit of the ends sought or desired by a handful of political masters and bureaucrats. Libertarianism, however, preserves each individual as a moral agent with the ability to make the choices that he wants with the means that he lawfully owns; it forms a true foundation for wider moral theory by reminding such theories that seeking violent enforcement of their ends is no theory of moral behaviour at all, such behaviour requiring moral responsibility for one’s actions. Thus we can see the importance of the place of libertarianism in philosophy as a whole is as a thinly conceived theory concerning the legitimate use of force and violence between rational persons. It is not a complete moral philosophy but it serves as a firm basis for moral philosophy, and this important purpose would be severely impaired if libertarianism as a theory was, instead, conceived of as “thick” or demanding additional moral imperatives.

Beginning from this understanding of libertarianism in theory we can move on to discussing libertarianism in practice. How will a libertarian world be brought about and what will it look like? What kind of institutions will build and preserve this libertarian world? What is it that is preventing us from achieving a libertarian world today? What needs to be the focus of our efforts? In answering these questions we are going to set ourselves the somewhat ambitious task of attempting at least a degree of reconciliation between what are perceived as distinct “camps” within the libertarian movement. First, there are the “thin” libertarians and the “thick” libertarians mentioned just a moment ago; and second, there are the “anarchists” – those who believe that no state is justified at all – and the “minarchists” – those who believe that minimal state is justified for the prevention of aggression. What we will show is that, when it comes to the most likely and practical way that a libertarian society can be introduced, these largely theoretical differences may not be that important and that all libertarians can proceed towards one, common aim.

In beginning our task we first of all need to define precisely what a libertarian society in the real world will actually be. An uncontentious definition would be a society in which the non-aggression principle is adhered to so widely, through one way or another, that violations of it amount to little more than minor incursions and nuisances rather than endemic, perennial societal ills. Some violent invasions against the person or property of other people will always exist – there will always be, after all, criminals and those who are willing to do bad things. The important point, however, is that they do not approach the scale of systematic violence and destruction that our governments heap on us today.

If we accept this definition then there are three problems which we need to consider. The first problem is how to eradicate, from the mainstream consciousness, the legitimisation of the initiation of force or violence – in other words, how do we ensure that the non-aggression principle comes to be viewed as both true and just by almost everyone? How will all persons, regardless of their status or position, come to be subject to this same, basic prescription? The second problem, however, concerns how we will reduce actual violations of the non-aggression principle to a level far below that at which we languish today in order for a very real peace and prosperity to flourish. It would be no good if we achieved the first goal of educating everyone about the injustice of stealing and killing, for instance, yet we all happily stole and killed because the incentives and institutions required to deter such violent behaviour did not exist or, indeed, were impossible to bring about. If this was the case then libertarianism would simply be a theory without any practical application, a whimsical idea that would have no relevance to the real world. The third problem, which is the most difficult of the three to comprehend, is whether a libertarian world will be created from the top down or from the bottom up. Will it be sufficient, for example, for a small band of diehard libertarians to overthrow the existing rulers, install themselves as the supreme leaders and proceed to order everyone to adhere to the non-aggression principle? Or will a sustainable libertarian world be brought about some other way?

Happily, if we examine each of these problems in turn we will find that they point to a common way forward. Addressing the first problem of the legitimacy of force and violence in our world today, we can see that the primary vehicle for this legitimisation is, without a shadow of a doubt, the state – and the democratic state in particular. It is already acknowledged by almost everyone that individual, private citizens cannot steal, murder, thieve, etc. There is no general or widespread problem of people failing to recognise that I, as a private citizen, may not, for instance, steal from my neighbours to fund my business, nor may I use violence to get other people to do what I want with their property. I may not kill someone in the street or bomb houses because I believe there might be some threatening or nasty people inside of them. These acts are, quite rightfully, recognised as unjust and illegal. When it comes to the mechanism of the state, however, people’s attitudes are markedly different. It is, apparently, perfectly legitimate for the state to steal from its citizens in order to fund its business of welfare and warfare; it is legitimate for the state to use force to “regulate” what you do with your own person and property, even though what you may wish to do inflicts no violence or infringement against the person or property of anybody else; the state is allowed to drop bombs on houses if it believes there are nasty people it doesn’t like inside, writing off the innocents who were killed or maimed in the process as “collateral damage” (or at least the state can do this in faraway lands where its voters neither have to see nor think about it). Far from being a check on state power, democracy (the only form of government that is assumed, without argument, to be just by anyone who expects to be taken seriously) has served to increase the power of the state – and thus the extent of its violence – by providing it with a veneer of legitimacy. The only thing that can possibly be said in favour of democracy is that, once one realises that a majority will always get its way one way or another, it provides for a relatively peaceful and bloodless transition of political power from one majority to another. Today, however, democracy has been exalted to a level far removed from what it deserves for providing solely this simple benefit. Because people believe that they are “choosing” their leaders and “choosing” the policies that are implemented by casting their vote or “having their say” this, for some reason, means that it is alright for the state to go about its business of force and violence in almost any way it likes. The power of kings, emperors and those who otherwise claimed some kind of unique, divinely endowed right to rule was kept in its place by the fact that everyone else was shut out from either the use or benefit of state power; no king ever managed to create a world of paper money that could be printed and accepted as payment without limit to fund his warring ventures, nor could he build a redistributive welfare state; no king ever had an alphabet soup of departments and agencies managing your home, your family, your workplace, the products you buy, the services you use, and so on. However, because everyone in a democracy is apparently allowed to “have their say”, such a system not only allows everyone an opening to benefit or even direct the state’s immoral acts via the mechanism of government, but because such acts have been “chosen” by the “will of the people” they are transformed from provoking moral outrage to provoking moral celebration. Never mind, of course, that people do not actually have any meaningful say in a representative democracy – all they are allowed to do is vote, once every few years, between a tiny selection of carefully screened candidates who create the impression that they are bitterly divided yet agree perfectly on all of the fundamental features of the state which libertarians oppose. Only occasionally are the people allowed to come out of their corner to fight, as the British did with the recent referendum on EU membership and the Americans did with the election of Donald Trump as their President. What is important for the legitimisation of force of violence, however, is the fact that people believe that they are in control of the state. It follows, therefore, that delegitimising the state and weakening the power of the state would go a long way to delegitimising the use of force and violence everywhere.

This leads us onto our second problem which is how to minimise the actual incidence of force and violence in society. Unsurprisingly our answer points once again to the primary culprit, which is the state. As we just mentioned, a powerful driving force for the actual commission of violent and invasive acts is their perceived legitimisation under the aegis of the democratic state. After all, if it is okay to relabel theft and violence as taxation and regulation and to do these odious acts through the mechanism of the state, then obviously they are going to be done a lot more often. However, so many of the catastrophes and calamities for which the state is responsible result from the actual, physical wealth and power that many states have managed to accumulate, with that wealth and power concentrated in an ever dwindling number of specific people and institutions. As a result of this the ability for the state to expand its predatory effects has been left almost unchecked. The consolidation of state territories into unified governments has been particularly disastrous in this regard. The two most destructive conflicts in history – the two world wars – occurred after the unification of Germany and Italy, with the drain the Bismarkian welfare state inflicted on the economic prosperity of Germany leading to the drive towards autarky and the perceived need to conquer the largely agrarian lands to the East. The nuclear terror perpetuated by the Cold War was made possible only because such large and powerful states as the United States and the Soviet Union were able to fund the building of their nuclear arsenals. The United States, the only remaining superpower today, has caused havoc in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and God knows where else simply because it can do so relatively unopposed. Smaller states with smaller tax bases and access to fewer resources simply cannot do this. Yet, ironically, because the state is still viewed as the fountain of all goodness, it is further state expansion which is called for in order to prevent war and preserve peace – as if it is all of us barbarous citizens who are causing all of the strife rather than the political leaders with their armies, navies and air forces. Proponents of such expansion fail to understand the obvious fact that if you wish to minimise war and its effects then the last thing you want to do is to make belligerents bigger and stronger as opposed to smaller and weaker. Nor do they understand that if you wish to promote trade and prosperity then so too must the state be cut down to size. The original project of the European Union was designed to unify and pacify the old warring colonial powers, creating a trading block with tariff free borders through which goods and workers could pass unhindered. We can certainly agree that the aims are broadly correct – if you wish to achieve economic progress then you need to encourage capital accumulation, which can only be done through relatively strong private property rights, minimal taxation and minimal regulation. However, the path that was taken to achieve this was to consolidate and centralise Europe’s political institutions in Brussels and to, eventually, create some kind of European super state. This is the precise opposite of what you want to do if your aim is free trade and increasing prosperity. If Europe, instead, consisted of several hundred, or even up to a thousand small territories and independent cities the size of say, Monaco, Liechtenstein or Luxembourg then the lack of each state’s ability to access both natural and human resources, except through international trade, would be reduced to a minimum; thus such states could only introduce onerous tariffs and border controls at the expense of crippling themselves. Moreover, a small state cannot increase its internal taxes and regulations to levels which are too onerous otherwise residents will simply hop across the border (which, in a small state, is likely to be only be a few miles away) leaving the heavily taxing state drained of its productive population. Thus, what keeps taxes, regulations and border tariffs minimal to non-existent is the competition between many small states so that they can attract investment, talent and resources. In turn, production of these things is encouraged and wealth creation accelerates. However, in a vast super state covering thousands of square miles and controlling an array of natural resources and a population of millions, the taxing and regulating authorities are now left relatively unchecked. No longer do they have to attract resources and talent and neither can these things leave as easily – for they are already there within the territory of the large state and crossing a border that may be thousands of miles away is markedly more difficult. It is for this reason that the EU has become one of the most heavily regulating and interfering state institutions in the world, a fact which incites farcical hilarity, if not utter despair, when you consider that there are more than 12,000 EU regulations concerning milk. If all of these regulations are necessary it’s a wonder how previous generations ever managed to enjoy the stuff at all. It is true that there may be no internal tariffs and border restrictions within the EU and yes, goods and workers can move freely between, say France and Italy. Business leaders acclaim how great this is for commerce and enterprise, yet what these business leaders overlook is that the EU itself has become a burdensome engine of internal taxation and redistribution that far outweighs any gain achieved through the abolition of border tariffs. Indeed, each member state’s contribution to the EU budget effectively amounts to a tariff anyway – the only difference is that the burden of paying it is borne by the citizens of each state as a whole rather than individual industries or businesses which ship goods to the EU. Fortunately the EU does not have any direct, taxing power over the citizens of member states, yet it has been moving to nullify tax competition between states, the very element that is so important for keeping tax rates low and for attracting investment. And let us not forget, of course, that the EU is more than happy to charge onerous tariffs on imports from outside of the bloc. Super states, and prospective super states such as the EU, are not single markets promising trade, prosperity and the best conditions for enterprise – they are, instead, single bureaucracies of heavy taxation, crippling regulation and welfare parasitism.

In his astonishingly perceptive book, The Breakup of Nations, Leopold Kohr pointed out that almost every notable achievement of the human race – great art, great literature, great culture, great technology, great philosophy, and so on – is all but irrelevant to the preservation of peace and prosperity. The only relevant factor is the size, or, rather, the relative size of states. Big states prey on their citizens and their foreign counterparts not because they think they either should or that to do so is good (although they may believe these things), but simply because they can. Great power endows one with great temptation, a temptation which political leaders nearly always cave in to. The evidence for this is difficult to dismiss. Centuries of cultural refinement marked by some of the world’s finest achievements in art, literature and music did not prevent France and Germany from each having their turn at conquering the whole of Europe; the philosophy of freedom and liberty didn’t stop the British from building an empire; the economic and technological progress of the United States has not stopped her from interfering, disastrously, all over the world. Yet the era in recent history which supposedly (but not entirely accurately) marked the nadir of man’s cultural and economic achievement – the Dark Ages – was, by comparison, relatively tranquil, as it was also populated, for much of its history, by relatively smaller, weaker states. From all of this it is clear that the breakup of states into far smaller units – what we might call political decentralisation – should be a clear aim of libertarians.

It is on this note of decentralisation that we move onto our third and final issue which is whether a libertarian world will be brought about from the “top-down” or from the “bottom-up”. Would it be enough, for example, for a defiant band of libertarians to take over the state apparatus and to enforce a libertarian legal code? What we have just said about power and corruption should make our initial answer obvious. If libertarians take over the state won’t they simply become corrupted by its power and influence? Or, more likely, if the populace whom they now govern was not similarly enamoured with libertarian values, wouldn’t the leaders cave into the pressure to use the power of the state to “act” in order to correct some kind of perceived societal ill? A comparable occurrence of this nature in recent history is the American Revolution, which is popularly portrayed as the overthrow of a tyrannous, foreign king by the oppressed but passionate American people fighting for their freedom. Yet, in reality, what occurred was that a new elite simply served to replace the power vacuum that had been left with the departure of the British. Not only were the founding fathers far from unified on the question of precisely which type of government should replace the ejected monarchy, but very quickly aspects of the new United States began to resemble those of their previous colonial masters. We know today, of course, that the Constitution of the United States has utterly failed to constrain the power of the federal government. Yet even reading the original text alone should alert a critical reader to how un-libertarian it was in the first place. It does, after all, preserve the power to tax among a myriad of other horrors in Section Eight of Article One such as declaring war, raising armies and the infamous commerce clause. Within mere years of its adoption, the very same people who were victors over the repressive British provoked the whiskey rebellion, enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, and even the great Thomas Jefferson found it difficult to constrain himself when, as President, he signed into law and draconically enforced the Embargo Act of 1807. If libertarians simply served to replace the despots they would very soon find themselves acting as the new despots. A genuine libertarian revolution will be impossible unless the power of the state is chopped from the bottom rather than simply given a haircut at the top.

The more important point, however, is revealed when we consider what it is that institutions such as property, rights, obligations and laws – the backbone of a libertarian society – are supposed to serve and how these institutions developed historically. The mainstream point of view in this regard is hopelessly confused, wallowing in a misunderstanding of the abilities and extent of human design and ingenuity. The results of such ingenuity are, of course, all around for us to see. We can easily marvel, for example, at the achievements of humans in the fields of science and engineering, at how we have transformed barren, dead matter into great structures such as buildings and bridges, how we have harnessed the power of electricity to provide us with heat and light, and how a device as small as a microchip can process information many times faster than the human brain. Every way we look we see the results of humans striving to shape the world in the way that we wish in order to meet our needs and improve the quality of our lives. Since the advent of Cartesian rationalism in philosophy, it has seemed almost obvious that if humans can shape the resources we have around us to do what we want them to do then so too can we apply this same engineering bent to society itself and to societal institutions. In other words, that we can deliberately shape society and design its institutions to do what we want them to do. If we can construct the Empire State Building then surely we can construct laws, regulations, rights, and obligations in order to make society a better place? That is the fundamental view of statists today – that society is something there to be managed, pushed in certain directions and squeezed into certain shapes by our political masters served by an army of elite intellectuals. The laws that are enforced are to be designed and enacted through legislation in order to push, from the top down, society onto a particular economic and moral path. Society, however, exists only because individual people perceive that social co-operation is essential for meeting their needs and for vastly improving their quality of life. In contrast to this, it would be quite possible for each person to be content to live an atomistic existence, finding his own food, building his own shelter and entertaining himself devoid of all social relations and interaction with anybody else. If this was the case then society, as such, would not exist. If the population of a territory consisted of 1,000 people yet each of those people lived such an isolated existence then that is all you would have – a piece of land with 1,000 people on it; you would not, however, have a society of 1,000 people. Because, as should be obvious, such an existence would result in the starkest and most brutal impoverishment, humans have, instead, decided to come together and co-operate. Such co-operation has developed from our existence as hunter gatherers, through the Neolithic Revolution and has reached its most advance form in the division of labour – the specialisation of each individual in a particular task which serves the needs of others. It is this social co-operation which is, in and of itself, society. Because the purpose of this co-operation is to further the needs of individuals it is the case also that the institutions that are required to facilitate this co-operation appeared because they made the pursuit of our individual needs and wellbeing easier. The great societal institutions – such as the family, the law, money, and morality – were never explicitly designed or “invented” by anybody. Rather, they were the product of centuries of evolution or of what we might call a “spontaneous order”, and the precise content of their makeup was determined by what facilitated the needs of individual people. The family, for example, developed during an era in which humans were pure consumers of what the Earth had to offer rather than producers – much like animals are. The availability of resources in a society which only consumes and never produces is heavily dependent upon the height of the population. As humans could keep on breeding merrily the population quickly rose to a level where the quantity of resources was insufficient and hence everybody suffered from a reduced standard of living. The family unit developed as a response to this problem in order to make fathers bear the cost of their own children. The more children they have then the more food and shelter they would have to provide for and so this furnished a powerful incentive to keep the population relatively in check. It is from this that our current code of sexual ethics has also developed – the requirement of sexual fidelity and the moral penalisation of sex out of wedlock, for example, all stem from the fact that such acts defeated, or could potentially defeat, the object of controlling the levels of population vis-à-vis resources. Money, which today is printed and controlled entirely by the state, was never explicitly designed by anyone but, rather, arose as a product of barter, whereby one or a handful of goods (usually, except for specific situations, precious metals) became more marketable than any other and hence came to be regarded as valuable not for whatever practical use they may serve but precisely because they could be exchanged. Nobody woke up one morning and, surveying the difficulty of trading individual goods directly, decided to say “I know! Let’s invent a good that we can all trade for everything else and call it money!” No wise leader started, out of the blue, to produce money or manufacture money, nor was the precise monetary commodity in a given situation explicitly chosen by anyone. Rather, given the immense power it afforded, the minting and issuing of money was usurped at a much later date – a usurpation which, of course, was only completed in 1971 when the US dollar’s last tie to gold was severed (and which may not be finally complete until states have succeeded in issuing a common, worldwide, paper currency). Law similarly evolved over centuries, or even millennia, out of interpersonal conflicts people ran in to over resources. The source of a legal case was the fact that two people each wanted to use the same resource to meet their own ends whereas, owing to the fact of scarcity, only one could do so. In other words the precise areas in which the law was concerned were decided by whether or not people could peacefully meet their needs in a given situation. If they could not then it was their perception of a conflict that gave rise to legal rules and principles. This is very important lesson that many libertarians, let alone everyone else, are yet to understand; the precise boundaries of aggression cannot be decided from on high by a wise and powerful leader because the elements of aggression – a physical invasion of another person’s property – are all dependent upon the parties’ perception of those physical transgressions as preventing them from fulfilling their needs with the resource in question. What is aggressive behaviour and what is not cannot be based upon what a political leader thinks is a conflict between two people (as all political leaders do when they enact legislation), nor can it be based upon some precise, scientific measurement of whether one body collided with another. If I shake a bed sheet and a piece of dust travels through the air and lands on your shoulder then, even though I have initiated an action which physically impacts on your person, this is not aggressive behaviour because such an action does not interfere with your ability to use your body to meet your ends. Indeed, most likely, you wouldn’t even be aware of the speck of dust at all. If, however, I threw the bedsheet over your head and wrestled you to the ground then this would probably be regarded as assault and the law would find me liable as such. Both actions concern a physical transgression of your person or property initiated by me, but only the one which interferes with your ability to use your person and property to meet your needs as perceived by you is the aggressive action. None of this should be taken to suggest, however, that the precise content of legal rules is purely subjective, nor should legal liability follow merely from somebody’s whim. Rather, objectively defined rules are drawn from typical experiences of what is and what is not aggressive, such typical situations arising before legal adjudicators again and again. Most people do not want to be killed by another person; most people do not want their belongings taken; most people do not want to be raped. So, for example, if one person kills another then it is presumed that the deceased did not so wish to be killed and the accused must adduce evidence to the contrary if he is to avoid liability. On the other hand, most people do not perceive that a speck of dust landing on their shoulder as a result of someone shaking a bedsheet is aggressive and invasive behaviour. So anyone who turned up before the court alleging that such an incident was aggressive would most likely be told that, even if, subjectively, this speck of dust prevented him from enjoying his person or property, he alone should bear the burden of protecting himself from this unusual sensitivity, rather than forcing everyone else to tiptoe around him. What we can see as a result of this, therefore, is that the precise boundaries of aggression which are expressed in precise laws are very much determined by the customary and conventional context. This is perhaps best illustrated when determining the requirements to enter contracts. If I sit down in a restaurant in Great Britain and order from the menu then that action is sufficient to make me liable to pay for the meal as that is how the situation is understood in this society. My refusal to do so on the grounds that I had not been told explicitly that I would have to pay would be laughed out of court. On the other hand, in another society, it might be the case that you are assumed to be a guest unless the proprietor of the establishment states that you must pay for your meal. If I raise my hand at an auction I might find myself liable to pay for one of the lots; if I do it outside in the street I am merely saying hello to someone. The action is the same but whether I am placing a bid or simply making a greeting has to be judged by the context. So the same thing can not only mean different things in different societies, with different consequences following, but so too might they mean different things in the same society depending upon the precise situation. Legal adjudicators have to assess what the actions of the parties meant and what they intended through their actions according to the social, customary and conventional context in order to determine the precise limits of legal liability. Because, as we said earlier, society is emphatically not something that is managed from on high but is, rather, motivated by individuals, this is an evolving rather than a static process. Such evolution can evolve only through case law, i.e. through law made or “discovered” through actual cases involving real people in real conflicts, rather than through legislation which involves only conflicts manufactured or perceived by politicians and bureaucrats. The importance of the customary and conventional context also applies to which beings may enjoy legal rights and which may not. Libertarians are often chided for their lack of agreement over the issues of abortion and the rights of children but, strictly speaking, these issues cannot be resolved theoretically. Libertarian theory will tell you which kinds of beings enjoy rights and which types of action are aggressive; it does not, however, tell you whether a specific being enjoys rights or whether a specific action is aggressive. The questions concerning the legal rights of foetuses and of children are of this latter category – do they qualify as the kind of beings to whom rights apply, i.e. are they rationally acting beings? And, if not, at which age or ages will a foetus or child be deemed, or at least presumed, to be a rationally acting being capable of enjoying rights? Is the fact that a foetus grows inside the mother an invasion of the mother’s body or has she demonstrated some kind of consent to the foetus’s growth? None of these questions are answered by libertarian theory but, rather, they concern the application of libertarian theory according to the customary, social and conventional context. To take a deliberately extreme example in order to illustrate this, early, primitive societies ascribed natural phenomena to the will of deities, and were unable to differentiate between inanimate phenomena (such as the sun or clouds) on the one hand and conscious beings on the other. Let us suggest that, in such a society, trees are perceived to possess personalities and to have rational thoughts and feelings which could, through some way, influence the course of events (in a similar vein, the present author, as a very young child, believed that trees shaking their branches were the cause of the wind, rather than vice versa). The legal system (or other social rules acting as a precursor to a legal system) of this society would recognise each tree as a legal person endowed with rights, and that to invade the tree’s physical presence would be an unlawful aggression against the tree’s person. Today, however, due to the advances of our scientific understanding, we have sufficient reason to believe that trees are not, in fact, rational beings nor do they possess the will or ability to alter the course of events. Although “living” they are not conscious and simply occupy the sphere of natural resources which can be owned by actual rational beings.

To re-emphasise, the important point about all of this is that, given that both the nature and the content of the elements that preserve societal order – such as rights, obligations, property – are determined by the needs of individual people, it follows that these elements can be neither determined nor shaped by groups of leaders or intellectuals acting from on high – in other words, by centralised, state institutions. Libertarians and free-market economists wax lyrical about how the state cannot hope to run and control specific industries productively in order to meet the needs of individual people and how the state has no rational method of directing resources in ways that best meet the needs of those people. Rather, such industries always end up succumbing to the priorities of the political leaders, the bureaucrats and the employees. Exactly the same is true of the institutions that concern societal governance. The entire state apparatus of legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, and their supporting police and military forces are designed not to give effect to and to prioritise the needs of individual people but, rather, to promote, enhance and push forward the visions of society held by liberal elites – visions of collectivism, equality, uniformity, and multiculturalism that destroy private, voluntary allegiances to localised institutions such as families, communities, and places of worship to direct it towards the glorification of the ever expanding state. The move towards greater state consolidation through supranational outfits such as the United Nations, the European Union, the IMF and so on is designed to concentrate decision making authority in an ever dwindling number of colossal institutions, centralising power and control in the handful of powerful oligarchs. A genuine libertarian society – a society distinguished by freedom for the individual – will therefore only come about through the destruction or dismemberment of the institutions which are diametrically opposed to this freedom. In practice this will mean halting and reversing the current trend towards state consolidation and inter-state co-operation, and seeking the breakup of individual states into as smaller territories as possible. This will scatter decision-making authority away from the centre and towards the individual as close as possible by achieving the increasing localisation of institutions which bear the responsibility for preserving order and governance.

The way forward for libertarians to bring about a libertarian world is therefore relatively clear – we must seek, emphatically, the de-legitimisation the state, the dilution of the power of the state, and the reduction of the size and territorial reach of each state. If, however, we needed to select just one of these elements – one call to action that could be regarded as the libertarian rallying cry – it appears that the third aim of reducing the size of each state is likely to have the greatest impact. Not only is it from this achievement that the other two are likely to follow but it is also the one which, at least after 2016, gives the appearance of being most likely to succeed and of being brought about in the right way from the bottom up rather from the top down. Ethno-nationalism and secessionism has returned to our world as a reaction against the forced centralisation of state institutions and metastasising of supra state bureaucracies; open borders, forced integration and globally managed trade are giving way to each state and smaller territories determining their own policies in this regard. Although our faith in the political process – the game that the statists want us to play – should be cautious, we have to hope that events such as the “Brexit” vote and the election of Donald Trump indicate only the beginning of this rebellion from the masses, a rebellion against the globalising, centralising and bureaucratising forces that will far eclipse the significance of those two events alone.

Moreover, this aim of seeking to reduce the territorial size of states and state institutions achieves also a degree of reconciliation between the distinct camps within the libertarian community we described earlier – between “thin” libertarians and “thick” libertarians on the one hand, and between “minarchists” and “anarchists” on the other. For libertarian “thickests”, we are fully conceding that the move towards decentralisation and to smaller state territories to likely to be dependent upon the willingness of people to place their trust in more localised, informal, and voluntary institutions such as a common culture, a common language, common customs, a common morality and a common (or a common absence of) religion. It is these alternative elements which are required to shift people’s reliance away from the formal apparatus of the state for their feeling of identity, security and community, and also to generate a feeling of empathy and friendliness within each locale which is needed to grease the wheels of social co-operation. It is precisely because these common elements are the antithesis of statism and state growth that all socialising theorists and politicians have sought to denigrate and destroy them – as they are largely trying to do now through mass migration and the fostering of welfare dependency. By eradicating cultural, community, conventional, customary identities (as well as traditional morality) through its egalitarian, all-inclusive, non-discriminatory, socialising programmes, the state simply sows distrust, hatred, and envy which makes easier its task of theft, violence, and welfare statism. We as libertarians, therefore, should regard the promotion of these common elements and informal institutions as necessary for bringing about a libertarian world. For libertarian “thinnests”, however, we are also acknowledging that we, as libertarians qua libertarians, need not promote a particular culture, a particular language, particular customs, or a particular moral code. It is true that certain cultures, customs and moral codes may be more conducive to sustaining the non-aggression principle than others (and, as I have argued elsewhere, the requirement of non-aggression is, in and of itself, likely to promote and emphasise certain, broadly conceived values). However, it is not our job to determine from on high what these customs and cultures might be and to enforce them upon everyone else. Our focus, rather, is on breaking up the giant, behemoth states so that people can find their own way, building their own communities based upon their own values. Without the power of vast states to enforce and support them, the flourishing of these individual communities will undoubtedly depend upon them being able to adopt values which promote proper order, governance and social wellbeing. However, much of this is largely achieved by the fact of cultural harmony in the first place – that everyone in a community largely agrees on the same basic values and that everyone’s behaviour is broadly acceptable to everyone else. In short, that all members of a given society are basically kindred spirits. Determining precisely what these values will be is, for libertarians, a secondary task at best. Moving on to minarchists and anarchists, if we break up states into relatively smaller sizes then minarchists can be satisfied that each territory still has some official institutions that are responsible for law and order; anarchists, however, will be relieved to know that because such decentralisation and deconsolidation increases the relative power of the individual vis-à-vis the state then the practical distinction between the state as a compulsory association on the one hand and as a voluntary association on the other becomes much less clear. Indeed, at some degree it will be completely abolished. At the extreme end, a small commune on a few acres of land comprising merely tens of people will be heavily reliant upon gaining the continual trust and enthusiasm of each of those people if the commune is to survive. However, a vast commune such as the former Soviet Union can treat each individual person however it likes – stealing from them, forcing them to do what it wants, and, of course, murdering them. Moreover, the ability of a small state to launch any foreign wars – which, in the long run, is the source of the loss of most of our freedoms – is vastly reduced, if not eradicated.

This, then, should be the goal of all libertarians, lovers of freedom, and those who are passionate about free enterprise and free association – breaking up the state into as smaller territories as possible and rendering state power and influence as inert as possible. We can hold some hope that this may be the way in which the tide is turning and that we can finally bring to a close this chapter in human history that has been marked by socialisation, collectivism, statism, bureaucratism and endlessly destructive warfare built on a cushion of false prophets, false values, false money, and a false prosperity.

Following the British referendum to leave the European Union on June 23rd and the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States on November 8th it is possible that 2016 will come to be regarded as a turning point in the direction of world history, a turning point that is favourable towards the progression of liberty and the diminishing of the size and scope of the state. This analysis will remain relatively brief as there have been, to be frank, so many libertarian analyses of both Brexit and the Trump phenomenon that another one is probably not needed. This essay will focus on the meaning of precisely what has happened so far and what libertarians now need to do in order to capitalise upon these events.

The first thing to note is that people across the world are rebelling against the forces of globalisation under the aegis of increasingly centralised and consolidated state power. What might be called “the establishment” and its plans for increasing hegemony through open borders, managed global trade and military interventionism have been dealt a severe blow by both the Brexit vote and the Presidential election. For the first time in generations the false choices presented by broadly and blandly similar political candidates who happen to come from different parties have been shattered and now it the fundamentals that are at stake. Indeed, few votes in recent times could have signified a real choice between one path and another. A vote for Britain to remain in the EU would have bolstered the European project, while Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton – who spoke of her “dream” for a unified hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders – was practically the personification of the status quo. Voting for Brexit and for Donald Trump, however, signified a widespread desire to depart from this status quo, a rejection of the current path and the destination to where it was heading. These are momentous events and we cannot help feeling a sense of optimism for the future, a chance that we might finally emerge from the dark clouds of the twentieth century socialist experiment – an emergence which received its last victory with the relatively peaceful collapse of Soviet communism, and the dissolution of the Soviet vassal states in Eastern Europe into independent territories.

As significant as these events have been, however, we must now turn to making some cautionary notes. First, while there has been a widespread desire for change we must remember that a change from the status quo is the only thing that has been signified. Precisely what people want us to change to, on the other hand, is less certain. As the present author mentioned in his earlier analysis of the Brexit vote, apart from the liberating tendencies of decentralisation which would be afforded by the breakup of the European Union, it would be a mistake to characterise that vote as a conscious battle between freedom and tyranny. People are certainly waking up to the fact that the present regime does not (and is not designed) to serve them, but this is a far cry from saying that they have embraced the cause of liberty and anti-statism as a whole. It is looking increasingly likely, for example, that Britain will replace European socialisation and enslavement with its own version, particularly following the passage this month of the Investigatory Powers Act – the so called “snoopers’ charter” which has been dubbed the most far reaching spying legislation ever enacted – and the turn towards increasingly Keynesian economic policies rather the monetary fiddling of former Chancellor George Osborne. In the US, many of Donald Trump’s proposed policies – such as increasing protectionism – are far from adequate solutions to the problems that his election indicates he has recognised, and may end up making things worse. The greatest risk, however, is that the final catastrophes and calamities resulting from the heinously unstable financial system, which is drowning in a sea of debt created by reams of increasingly worthless paper money, will be realised within the next four years. For Brexit, this might not matter too much – the precarious state of the Eurozone is not likely to weather any serious financial collapse any better than an independent Britain. It could, on the other hand, be disastrous for the Trump administration. Apart from the fact there is no telling what Trump may do in response to these calamities, the average American, having no real grasp of economics or of cause and effect, may well associate this disaster with their new President and his markedly different economic policies. We can be almost certain that the defeated left will use such an opportunity to demonstrate that capitalist businessmen, led by one of their most prominent stereotypes, have failed once again and that only the experienced, professional politicians of the ilk of Obama and Mrs Clinton should have been trusted to steer the giant ship. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the Trumpian revolution has come too early and may have been better in 2020 after a Clinton administration had to deal with, and be rightly blamed for, a complete economic collapse. Instead, a lot may depend, between now and then, upon the continuity of the trust that Trump has built with those who voted for him, his ability to identify the future financial disaster as the product of the very forces he fought in the election, and the continuing evaporation of the integrity of the left and the mainstream media.

The second and related issue is that, unfortunately, neither Brexit nor the election of Trump signifies any kind of unified desire for change – rather, they represent a stark and bitter division among their respective peoples. Although both results were decisive they were hardly landslides, and if one believes the official count of the Presidential election (which would include any illegal votes and other fraudulently cast ballots) then Mrs Clinton won the popular vote, losing only because of the Electoral College system. Thus, there is still a vast number of people who do not desire the change that the victorious voters desire. From this, we can expect a bitter battle, a battle that will ultimately be won by ideas. Although the “remainers” in Britain and the ideological left in the US are far from a coherent bunch, it is possible to suggest that they represent a more readily identifiable set of ideas than their opponents – and, of course, they benefit from the existing institutional structures. Their opponents, on the other hand, most likely had a myriad of different rationales for voting the way that they did and one of the problems that has been associated with Brexit in particular is that there is no particular “Brexit strategy” – some wanting a so-called “hard Brexit” of severing all ties from the so-called “single market” which would leave Britain free to pursue its own interests, with others wanting a “soft Brexit” promising continued access to the “single market” and some contribution to the EU budget, much like the relationship that Norway has with the EU. There is no problem, of course, with people having their own private reasons for voting the way that they did. However, this seeming lack of ideological unity may well make it very easy for the establishment forces to couch their worldview as the one that represents progress, inclusiveness and co-operation while writing off everyone who voted for Brexit or Trump as simply backward thinking racists, rednecks or “little Englanders” who want to retire to their little tight, white communities, shutting themselves off in isolation and having nothing whatsoever to do with the challenges that the world has thrown at us. It is true, of course, that part of the anti-establishment backlash was precisely because of this characterisation and the hubristic attitude that everyone who did not share the visions of the liberal elite could simply be slandered and ignored. However, it is also true that the anti-establishment voters for Brexit have still not yet elaborated convincingly how their side is the representation of genuine progress towards a peaceful and prosperous society – and it is this that presents the greatest threat to our ability to capitalise upon what we have experienced in this watershed year. It is here, of course, where libertarianism and libertarian ideas are perfectly suited for filling the vacuum as only libertarian ideas provide both a marked contrast to the establishment programme and a demonstrable ability to build a world of sustainable peace and prosperity. It is only libertarianism that can point out the falseness of the globalising elites’ desire for “inclusiveness”, “co-operation” and “unity”. For what they really mean is inclusiveness, co-operation and unity under the banner of globally expanding and consolidating state powers under the yoke of a single, global bureaucracy with the only possible alternative being, in the minds of the elites, to retreat into a barbaric, atomistic existence where everyone hates everyone else and we all wish to remain on our own private island. Only libertarianism can show that the elites’ vision of inclusiveness, co-operation and unity is the shell of all of these things enforced by the barrel of a gun – in other words that we would all be co-operating in an inclusive and unified manner if we were doing what the elites wanted us to do rather than what we wanted to do ourselves as private individuals who wish to make things better for ourselves and for our families. Only libertarianism can show that genuine co-operation and inclusiveness is practised not by the bloated bureaucratisation of all aspects of our lives, but by private individuals and institutions on their own terms through voluntary trade and consensual desire for association. Only libertarianism can show that, far from being against global integration and global networks, the genuine alternative to the establishment narrative is to create an expansive and integrated division of labour across the entire world, with each of us choosing to specialise in that which we do best in order serve other people. It is only libertarianism that can show that we, in rejecting the elitist approach, are embracing an outward looking and engaging manner with the rest of the world – not a closed, curmudgeonly, hateful and xenophobic society. Hence, 2016 marks the beginning, not the culmination, of the point at which libertarian education and libertarian ideas take on crucial importance because, having placed the fundamentals back onto the political table, there is now an ideological vacuum to fill. It is particularly crucial that we work to ensure that libertarianism fills this void given that so many of the young are choosing to fill it with Bernie Sanders-style socialism (which is really just a dressed up version of tax and spend Keynesianism). Needless to say, this would be a disaster.

One final possibility that we should countenance is that the sharp political divide may well provide an impetus for the kindling of secessionist movements. Remain voters in the Brexit referendum were heaviest in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, while much of the rest of Britain was decidedly in favour of leaving. After the result the possibility was mooted, perhaps half-jokingly, of London becoming an independent city that could join the EU singlehandedly. In the US, Mrs Clinton carried the Pacific states and most of the North East while Trump carried the South and most of the Midwest and mountain states. With the backlash against the election result in the blue states, revolution and secession has been introduced as a possibility – something of an irony when it comes from the side that has, for decades, pleaded for gun control. We as libertarians should not be afraid of this possibility; indeed, we should positively welcome it. It is far better for a bunch of wilful yet smaller states and territories to go off on their own and socialise themselves rather than inflict their misery on the rest of us. Even where we do not share their motivations we as libertarians should look favourably upon any secessionist and decentralising movement that weakens the power that is concentrated in large and consolidated state entities.

It is accepted by the mainstream that state regulation of the free market is a necessary feature of the so-called “mixed economy”, the supposed halfway house that allows us to benefit from capitalism without succumbing to its alleged excesses while, at the same time, avoiding the catastrophe of all-out socialisation and state control. This essay will subject this view to a critique and will reveal that, in fact, regulation of markets does nothing more than substitute arbitrary government preferences for the preferences of freely acting individuals, is a cause of the very “excesses” (such as oversized firms) which are blamed on capitalism, and that the best regulator is, in fact, the free market itself.

In examining “regulation” we should first be clear about precisely what it means, which is that the state will use the force of law in order to, compel, prohibit, restrict or otherwise subject to control some targeted behaviour of its citizens. In other words, it is a violent, physical intervention into people’s lives in order to produce one outcome while preventing another. This seems perfectly justifiable in instances when the behaviour that is subject to regulation is neither peaceful nor voluntary and is in fact invasive and predatory – in other words the particular behaviour under consideration constitutes a crime, such as murder and theft. However much libertarians may dispute either the legitimacy or effectiveness of the state in preventing and/or responding to such acts, we can at least understand the need for this kind of regulation – to protect people from the violent, invasive and uninvited actions of others, actions which are, of course, unjustifiable in libertarian theory. But what do we mean by state regulation of the free market? The very phrase “free market” is an abstraction used deliberately by commentators to deflect attention away from what it actually is and to create, instead, the impression that it is some kind of self-aware, self-controlling entity that can indulge in all of its irrational flights of fancy while being subject to neither rule nor reason when it seemingly appears out of nowhere to inflict grave harm upon us in the same way that a criminal might. The free market, however, is nothing more than individual people and institutions trading goods and services voluntarily on terms which they agree amongst themselves. It is a diffuse, decentralised network of people striving to meet their own needs as they perceive them and to seek others to provide the wherewithal to better their lives. It is an entirely peaceful, voluntary operation and no one is forced to participate in any exchange with another individual if he does not believe that he will be better off as a result of the exchange. For the state to regulate the market, then, means that the state will use force in order to diminish, control or otherwise outlaw certain transactions which otherwise may have been undertaken voluntarily had the regulation not been present. For the state to regulate is to introduce a code of violent compulsion into otherwise peaceful and voluntary relationships.

There is something distinctly odd when state “protection” through regulation is extended beyond crimes into the arena of voluntary relations. For what is it that people are really being protected from here? Voluntary transactions do not come out of nowhere to surprise us like an armed robber might do. Rather, they must be chosen freely and consciously by each individual person. So if every transaction in the free market requires a voluntary choice then the only purpose of regulation must be to “protect” us from the results of our own choices and to prevent us from entering certain transactions which we may otherwise like to enter if the terms are attractive to us. People often think that those being regulated are unscrupulous vendors who may try to sell us some kind of snake oil solution to a problem we may have. It is true, of course, that crooked businessmen may try to sell us something that doesn’t really work, is a fake, or causes some kind of fire or damage. However, these instances constitute a fraud or a tort and are already governed by the area of the law that regulates involuntary or invasive acts. Regulation of the free market, on the other hand, is solely concerned with restricting the transactions that people may be happy to undertake voluntarily with no force or fraud. As it takes two to complete a transaction – the purchaser and the vendor – if businesses are prevented from choosing to sell then you are equally prevented from choosing to buy. Our choices are therefore constricted by state regulation as much as those of businesses selling to us are and it is us who are regulated as much as businesses are. It is for this reason that an excessively regulatory and bureaucratic jurisdiction is often nicknamed “the nanny state” – a persistent and seemingly omnipresent matriarch who never ceases to stop interfering in your life in order to make sure that you make the “right” choices, choices that it believes are better for your life regardless of the maturity and sophistication of your own decision-making process.

There are several mantras or excuses that the state uses to justify its regulation of voluntary transactions – the prevention of rash, impulsive or short sighted behaviour; imperfect or otherwise flawed knowledge on the part of one of the parties to the transaction; maintaining standards of quality; and finally, the great all-encompassing excuse that seems to validate the state’s wading into anything it pleases, which is maintaining standards of safety. Doubtless there are other categories of state regulation also (such as environmental regulation and control of so-called “essential” industries) but these four form the backbone of the state’s regulatory bodies. We will proceed now to examine each of them in turn and in doing so we will reveal the damaging effects of state regulation while demonstrating how, in fact, the free market itself is the best regulator.

First, then, is the prevention of rash, impulsive, or short sighted behaviour. The implication here is that people may enter a transaction which provides, or has a chance of providing, benefits in the short term while providing a high likelihood of burdens in the future – possibly severely detrimental burdens such as economic ruin, ill health or early mortality. So in other words, people may choose to use tobacco, alcohol or narcotic products to achieve an immediate sense of pleasure without considering the longer term effects, or they may choose to gamble, bet, or otherwise enter some kind of financial arrangement that promises untold wealth if it is successful, but may result in economic ruin if it is not. In economic jargon the complaint here is that people’s time preferences are too high and that the inducement towards the present good is so strong in people’s minds that they heavily discount the possibility of the future bad. People discard prudence, foresight, and good judgment in favour of emotional, impulsive and irrational motives, and so the state should step in, so the argument goes, in order to prevent people from falling victim to their own lack of patience. In the first place we might as well mention that, while it is true that some or, indeed, many decisions may be regretted after the fact, it is the case that all actions can result in consequences that are either detrimental or not as favourable as those that were intended. Prior to an action, costs and benefits are only hypothetical and it is always easy to judge an action with the benefit of a retrospective view. However, as it is also true that some actions are more likely or are guaranteed to produce a longer term detriment in spite of an immediate gain, the more important point is that people’s time preferences are no business of the state’s and it is dubious to assert that people should, in all instances, prefer the longer term to the shorter term – at least not to the extent that the force of law is used to compel such a preference. There is no reason, for instance, why someone should not value the immediate pleasure from a cigarette instead of a longer, healthier lifespan and it is quite possible for an individual to regard a longer life as duller if it is devoid of short term pleasantries. The regulation of an action may stop, restrict, or otherwise control the action but it does not stop the motivating desires behind the action itself which are imbedded wholly within people’s minds. The preferences that influenced them still exist and have not been eradicated, and people are, instead, forced to embrace an outcome which they do not regard as preferable. So in other words, while the individual may have to forego a benefit today, in his own mind the pain of having done so in order to wait for another benefit to come sometime in the future (such as a longer, healthier life) may be worse to that individual. That person, from his point of view, suffered a loss rather than a gain. Regulation doesn’t, therefore, make benefits appear and costs disappear; rather, it simply forces people to endure what are, in their minds, heavier costs.

However, even if we were to accept the premise that people should take the longer view, the irony here is that regulation and state interference into people’s lives is what causes high time preference and rash, impulsive behaviour in the first place, along with the eradication of any kind of prudence, patience, good foresight and self-responsibility. In particular, the existence of the regulatory state fosters the mind-set that if an action is dangerous, or has a high chance of producing an unfavourable outcome, then the state will ensure that it is banned or the dangerous elements are removed. In other words because an army of bureaucrats has gone through the decision-making process on your behalf you simply do not have to care or pay any attention to the possible negative results of your actions because the guiding hand of the state will ensure that only good things can flow from anything you do. Indeed, the regulatory state is little more than a giant, inflatable cushion for people to avoid having to take responsibility for the consequences of their own decisions. When, of course, a decision in an unregulated area turns sour the cry is always “why were they allowed to sell this awful thing tome!” whereas what they really mean is “why was I allowed to choose to buy this awful thing from them!” What results, therefore, is a vicious circle where the growing regulatory state induces less prudence, a lower standard of care and thus more bad decisions that need to be met by increased regulation. To make matters worse if the regulatory state fails and you do happen to suffer some negative consequences, then in comes the helping hand the welfare state to rescue you anyway. If you drink or smoke too much and fall sick then state provided healthcare will look after you; if you gamble away your life savings then state benefits will still keep you fed, watered and sheltered even if you haven’t achieved the riches that you might have had you been successful. The upside of all of these decisions remains intact – that lucky horse may still promise to pay out millions and the whiskey will taste as good – but the downside has been heavily reduced as the state has insulated you from having to realise, or pay for, the full extent of the natural penalties of your actions if they occur. Thus, these types of frivolous and imprudent actions have become more attractive rather than less, and so they will be taken more frequently rather than less, resulting in more negative consequences rather than fewer. The result of this is, of course, moral hazard – carelessness for your actions when you can preserve your gains while heaping your losses onto everyone else. And finally, of course, all of this takes place within the sphere of the state’s inducement of a high consumption, high time preference society through the illusion of prosperity brought about by the forced lowering of interest rates, monetary inflation and the smokescreen of paper wealth.

Obviously, in a society that is wholly unregulated by the state people would be responsible for their own actions, and a culture of better decision making and more prudential planning would be induced. This does not mean, however, that you are completely on your own in determining whether you should proceed with a decision – an allegation of those who believe that the free market leads to an atomistic existence. It is this aspect that we will now explore when we examine the next reason that is proffered for the supposed necessity of regulation – imperfect or otherwise flawed knowledge on the part of one of the parties to the transaction. It is usually the case, of course, that the sellers of everything we choose to buy are experts in that particular product or service they are selling. They developed the product; they know what it should be capable of; they know the science behind it; they know where its raw materials or ingredients came from, who put them all together and how; they spend all day studying and marketing to their target demographic. We, on the other hand, are not so expert in these products, of which we may buy tens or even hundreds in a given week. We do not have the time to sift through mountains of information in order to find out whether a particular product is suitable for us, or whether it is likely to end up being either a waste of money or the cause of a much steeper loss. Surely the state should step in and compel companies to provide more information about their products? Surely it is only because of state regulation that we have mandatory lists of ingredients and nutritional breakdowns on food products and surely it is only because of the mandatory inclusion of warning labels that we know not to iron clothes while we are wearing them?

The key to unlocking this is to realise that the provision of information is an end in itself, an end which consumes scarce resources. Therefore, the value of this information needs to exceed the cost of those resources. To take a ridiculous example, the time it takes to cook an egg on the sunlit body of a car is a piece of information. The vendor of the car would spend valuable resources, such as labour, eggs, a stopwatch, etc. in gathering and publishing this information. However, if this information is useless to prospective purchasers of the car – in other words, it would not affect their desire to purchase the car one way or the other – then the vendor has incurred a deadweight cost and has simply wasted resources that would have been better spent on something else. How much information should be provided is part of the market process and it is consumers themselves who will determine through their purchasing habits whether or not a given set of information is valuable and is a requirement of a purchase. If consumers happily purchase products without receiving certain information then it indicates that the provision of such information would be a waste; if they choose to abstain then it may indicate that the purchase, on its present terms, is too risky and they require extra resources to be spent on providing more information about what it is they would be buying. It is here, of course, where the market’s own key regulator – price – steps in. At a low enough price consumers may be happy to purchase the product without further information as the risk of loss is relatively low so that gathering extra information would not be worthwhile. If the price was relatively high, however, consumers may demand more information so that they are more equipped for making a better decision before committing a relatively larger sum of money. And, of course, products sold with less information will, all else being equal, usually be priced lower than products sold with more information anyway on account of the fact that the vendor of the former products has not had to incur an extra cost. The forced provision of information by the state, however, is markedly different. Because it is not subject to the profit and loss test there is no way of telling whether such information is valuable or not; it is simply an arbitrary decree that resources must be directed in a way other than that desired by consumers. Additional costs are then heaped onto suppliers which, of course, result in higher prices for products – the extra money being spent on something that consumers simply do not want. To take a another extreme example, the state could mandate that an information booklet the size of a telephone directory should be sold with every loaf of bread, detailing the precise ingredients, the transportation process used, a detailed schematic of the ovens used for baking, the life stories of the baker and the wheat farmer and so on. It is obvious that the provision of this useless information would increase enormously the cost of a loaf of bread and thus make consumers worse off than they were before. The principle remains the same when the state requires seemingly more “sensible” – but still useless for the consumer – information to be provided.

The principle is also the same for the next two reasons that the state has for increasing the scope of regulation – maintaining standards of quality and standards of safety. The quality of a product is also part of the market process and cannot be subject to arbitrary standards. At any one time a higher quality product will, all else being equal, cost more than a lower quality product – meaning that more resources must be devoted to producing the higher quality product than the lower quality product. If more resources are used in creating a higher quality product then fewer resources are left over to be devoted to other things. Consumers must choose whether they wish their resources to be spent on a few higher quality or many more lower quality products through their purchasing habits. If they prefer the latter yet the government mandates that higher quality products must be produced then consumers are made worse off than they otherwise would have been. The sustainable way to increase quality is to increase the number of resources available so that such quality can now be afforded. It is here where the free market’s own regulatory mechanisms step in. If consumers, as a result of an increase of available wealth, demand that vendors produce higher quality items then quality standards are likely to develop within each industry. If vendors have to demonstrate that their products have reached a certain standard of quality then it creates a market for reputable, third party certifiers to examine the product and declare that it has met the required standards of quality that are expected by consumers. If it does not then no such declaration is made and the business must go back to the drawing board. Such third parties will be interested in making honest and trustworthy appraisals as it is the trustworthiness of their appraisals that lead to more product sales and hence, more vendors seeking their services for quality certification. Increased quality is therefore achieved through increased wealth creation which makes more resources available for this quality to be achieved, as opposed to state regulation which simply redirects existing resources from places where they are already needed.

Exactly the same is true when it comes to product safety because increasing safety also consumes valuable resources and we as consumers must determine how many resources we wish to divert from providing for other ends towards providing for more safety. With the regulation of product safety, it is important again to emphasise that we are not talking about the regulation of actions which may be defined as crimes or torts. If someone loads a child’s toy with explosives and it detonates then clearly such an action would be unlawful. Rather, what we are talking about is the regulation of safety standards that are accepted by both parties as terms of the contract – in other words, where the standards of safety sold are part of the product’s features or definition. For example, all else being equal, a car built with a thicker chassis, or a chassis constructed out of a stronger material, is likely to have greater crashworthiness than a car with a thinner chassis or a chassis constructed out of weaker material. If the latter car is purchased then the lower crashworthiness – and the resulting lower protection of the vehicle’s occupants in the event of a collision – is an accepted part of the contract and an accepted feature of the vehicle. Once again, the market’s own regulator – price – is king in this regard. All else being equal, the less safe car will be less expensive than the safer car. If consumers choose to purchase the less safe car the resources which could be spent on making the car safer are better off, from their point of view, being used somewhere else. If, however, the state steps in and mandates that, in the name of increasing safety, only the more expensive car should be sold then this would clearly lead to impoverishment. Indeed, some people may not even be able to afford the super safe car at all. They previously chose to purchase the less safe car because the value of the transportation it provided was worth the risk of being more heavily injured in the event of a crash. If state mandated “safety” standards price them out of the market so that they cannot afford a car at all then they have clearly lost very heavily. There is no such thing as a “no brainer” safety requirement that is valid in all places at all time – there is only what can be afforded. Requirements only seemingly become “no-brainer” when they can be easily afforded. And, of course, the way to increase the affordability of safety is to increase wealth creation so that more resources are available to be devoted towards increasing product safety. Just as with the increase of quality, if consumers, as a result of an increase of available wealth, demand that vendors produce safer items then industrywide standards of product safety will develop. If vendors have to demonstrate that their products have reached a certain standard of safety then, once again, the market is opened for reputable, third party certifiers to determine whether a product has achieved the standard that is expected by consumers. Underwriters Laboratories is an example of such a private, third party solution. Increased safety, like increase quality, is therefore achieved through increased wealth creation which makes more resources available for safer products to be made, as opposed to state regulation which simply confiscates existing resources from other ends.

What we have learnt from all of this is that regulation itself consumes valuable resources and so the value it produces must also take place in the societal rank of values. It cannot stand apart from the market process but must, rather, be part of it. The allegation that the markets are never “self-regulating” simply amounts to stating that people are not making the correct choices with resources that they own whereas the budding critic does. If the market is not “self-regulating” then, as we explained earlier, it means that people are not self-regulating and must be forced into making choices other than the ones that they prefer.

Earlier we explained how one of the tragic ironies of regulation is that it creates the very need for its own existence by perpetuating rash and foolish purchasing choices as people come to believe that the state is there to protect them from any possible negative consequence. Unfortunately, such a perpetuation is present on the supply side of the market as well. An increasing regulatory code heaps onto the shoulders of vendors increasing costs of compliance with that code. As well as spending money on market research, developing their products and targeting their advertising, prospective entrepreneurs not only have to hire armies of lawyers to ensure that they are complying with the regulatory code but very often the regulatory code itself will require the business to make an additional outlay – such as the requirement to publish extra information. The costs of compliance with regulation are more easily borne by large, established businesses yet they may be devastating to small start-ups or entrepreneurs with limited capital. For example, in a report for the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Nicole and Mark Crain of Lafayette University calculated that the per-employee cost of federal regulatory compliance was $10,585 for businesses with nineteen or fewer employees, but only $7,755 for companies with five hundred or more. It is for this reason why regulation is, in fact, favoured rather than opposed by large, established businesses – for it creates a cosy cartel between business and the state which shuts out most prospects of new competition while at the same time saving face when they duly comply with these regulations for the “benefit of the consumer”. However, such stifling of competition is what creates some of the very problems that regulations are supposed to solve – poor provision of information, poor quality, and poor safety features. The result, therefore, is that regulation needs to increase in order to produce standards of consumer service that the free market would have produced by itself – except now with the deduction of the enormous cost of passing, complying and monitoring the said regulations. All of the supposed pitfalls and excesses of capitalism are therefore not a product of the free market but are, in fact, spawned by the regulatory state – and the response is supposed to be more regulation and increased oversight by a growing state bureaucracy. The most complained about industries in the world today, such as utilities, public transport and healthcare, supposedly demonstrate the tragedy of allowing private actors to provide so-called “essential” goods and services. Yet it is those very industries that suffer from the heaviest state interference.

State regulation of the free market is, therefore, a truly self-perpetuating, self-growing monstrosity, creating the very problems it seeks to solve – lazy, careless, and thoughtless purchasing choices on the one hand, and an oligarchy of large, greedy, unscrupulous businesses on the other, stifling economic progress and innovation in favour of micromanagement by a faceless bureaucracy. It is also a symptom of the globalist elitist agenda to unify and harmonise state bureaucracies into international trade agreements and treaties so that the reach of control and top-down direction does not stop at the state border – an agenda that was recently rebuffed (although will probably not be solved) by both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as the next US President. If we wish to regain economic progress and win back our liberty then destroying the regulatory state must be a high priority.

In some recent essays concerning the UK’s referendum in June to determine its membership of the European Union, and the virtues of small states as opposed to larger states, we elaborated some themes regarding how decentralisation and decentralising processes are a boon for individual liberty and a step towards harmony and economic progress. This essay will gather these thoughts together with an emphasis on how small or, rather, optimally sized institutional units pave the way towards two things that not only libertarians, but also everyone else, will claim to want to achieve – economic prosperity on the one hand, and minimal war and conflict on the other.

The mantra of statist and, indeed, mainstream political thinking is that unity, centralisation and the consolidation of states and state institutions is the way forward for peace and prosperity. Not only does this mean larger state institutions with more power but also the fusion of individual states into larger territories under a single jurisdiction. In some ways this seems plausible, even to the libertarian. Wouldn’t unified laws will aid certainty? Wouldn’t we be better off if there were no borders or tariffs to impede the trade goods and workers? And surely the possibility of war will be diminished if we all join together under one, unified banner?

The main problem with this view, however, is that it places the state, state institutions and what these institutions wish to achieve at the centre of society. All of the millions of individual people and thousands of non-state, voluntary institutions that are motivated by their own desires, values and choices are ignored or at least subsumed by the grander edifice. Most lay people who hold the centralising view probably do so naively, but it is the primary preoccupation of statists and intellectual elites that society is something to be managed, controlled or directed by them and those like them while all of the lesser beings should be made to obey quietly with the confidence that their highly educated masters are doing what is best for them. Indeed, rather than seeing any value in individual, voluntary and non-state institutions, the centralising view treats the human race as one, giant, amorphous blob, like a lump of play dough that can be shaped in any way and manner that can be chosen at will – and that the easier it is for the dough to be shaped then the better society will be. Hence, the holders of this view are likely to look favourably upon institutional centralisation and consolidation which conveniently places more power in the hands of people such as themselves to achieve their shaping of society according to their visions. This attitude was rife, at least implicitly, among the so-called “Remainers” in the UK’s “Brexit” vote on June 23rd. Not only, is it believed, that all good things flow from the top down like manna from heaven, but that anyone who was in favour of leaving the EU was, in some way, stupid, backward or a kind of provincial, country hillbilly. For instance, shortly after the referendum, Professor A C Grayling called on Parliament to block Britain’s exit from the EU on the grounds that it is Parliament’s job to determine what is best for the electorate, the latter of which lack “the expertise, patience and time” to make decisions via a direct vote. The implication of this is that the people do not know what is best for them and they have blindingly walked down the path of sheer folly by voting to leave the EU, and they should instead have placed their trust in those better educated than themselves. However, he has completely missed the lesson that should have been learned from this result. The establishment wheeled out all of the big guns in order to persuade the electorate to vote for “Remain” – including the current and the three former living Prime Ministers, most of Parliament and the Cabinet, the Bank of England’s chief and other big bank bosses, the IMF, directors from at least fifty-one FTSE 100 companies, and many heads of foreign governments including the President of the United States – and yet “Leave” still won the vote. When the advice of all of these heavyweights is rejected by the British public then, instead of stooping into a sulk over the supposed stupidity of the great unwashed and demanding that they defer to the “expertise” of their so-called representatives, Grayling and his ilk should realise that such a rejection indicates that everyone is just a bit fed up of being told what is good for them and having decisions made for them by political elites. Such decisions and endless promises of peace and prosperity have brought us, in the last twenty years, two burst financial bubbles, massive money printing that has made the rich richer while failing to provide productive jobs and increasing incomes for everyone else, and at least half a dozen disastrous wars and interventions that are producing deadly blowback in the form of terrorism. What the elitist attitude ignores is that society is not something that is there to be engineered and moulded like a lump of metal in a blacksmith’s forge. Rather, it is made up of individual people who shape it according to their individual thoughts, feelings and desires, motivated by what they believe is best for themselves and for their families. An economy is not some giant machine into which goes “input” to be processed by “jobs” into some kind of “output”, nor is it necessarily true that the higher the numbers of “input”, “jobs” and “output” the better everything is. Rather, a prosperous economy is the product of individual people trading resources voluntarily in directions that they see fit so that they can satisfy ends that they wish to see fulfilled. “Society” is not a collective that demands broad brush categories such as “food” or “houses” or “better railways” etc. Rather, it is me wanting, say, a ham sandwich at 1pm on Tuesday, or you wanting a small apartment in the Hampstead area of London to rent for three years, a business wanting to invest in a small car factory that will be completed in the five years, and everyone else wanting a myriad of highly specific ends in highly specific places at highly specific times that are the product of our own choosing. The economy is not something to be directed by central banks who squash the rate of interest down to its lowest possible point through so-called “monetary policy” or “quantitative easing” in order to “stimulate” some kind of beast into life. Rather, the rate of interest reflects the strength of everybody’s individual preferences for consumption ahead of investment so that the correct amount of resources can be sustainably channelled into roundabout methods of production. Each of us co-operates, through the division of labour, to accomplish things that we each want with the resources available in varying timescales that we are each prepared to bear. It is this co-operation of individuals to achieve their own ends through the nexus of production, trade and exchange that creates a society and not any management and direction from giant, all-encompassing institutions that achieve their ends through force.

The second problem with the centralising view is that the achievement of peace and prosperity in fact demands the very opposite of state and institutional centralisation and consolidation. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, harmony is achieved by division, not unity, while the growth and strength of the human race as a whole is accomplished by the weakness, relative to each other, of its component parts. Economic prosperity, for instance, is characterised by a growing complexity of the economic system – an increasing division of labour with more and more different people specialising in more and more different tasks to produce more and more different products for more and more different people. In other words, its natural tendency is to spread outwards from the centre with more diffused, decentralised knowledge and specialisation. Growth and centralisation of the institutions that support this prosperity under the banner of unity are therefore likely to stifle rather than aid its progress. Indeed the very concept of “unity” requires the same, repeated rules for everyone and the same approaches towards everything regardless of their individual, specialist needs. Hence you get the proliferation, in large, consolidated states, of “one size fits all solutions” that attempt to force everyone through a single, “unified” channel, as though all of us with all of our differences characteristics and requirements are being squeezed through a sausage maker to create a bland, blended puree. (Curiously, those who champion centralisation and state uniformity are also the ones who squeal for “diversity” and celebrating “difference” – at least when those diverse differences are demonstrated or practised by favoured minority groups). Indeed, it is usually, if not always, the case in nature that as something becomes bigger and more complex it is characterised by greater division and decentralisation, not by increased unity and consolidation. A human being is not simply a larger version of a single cell organism. Rather, he is made up of a countless number of individual cells that coalesce into different organs and tissues, each of which specialises in different life sustaining activities. We do not have one, single “unified” organ that pumps the blood, inhales and exhales air, rids the body of toxins, acts as a nervous system and also as a skeleton. In other words as nature achieved a complex human being by decentralising and delegating various functions to different organs that act independently of, but symbiotically with each other, so too will humans only achieve a complex and prosperous society by increasing the division of labour and the degree of specialisation in more and more decentralised institutions.

Division rather than unity is also necessary for creating and preserving the conditions that economic prosperity requires – strong private property rights, minimal taxation and minimal regulation. The benefits of a large number of divided states as opposed to large, unified states, is that if one tiny state of a size equivalent to Luxembourg implements, say, an onerous tax then only that state is affected and the disruption to everyone else in the world will be relatively minimal. If that state introduces ridiculously high border tariffs then only the small proportion of global trade into that territory will be burdened while freer trade will remain for everybody else. Similarly if that state introduces burdensome laws and regulations that infringe upon people’s lives only those people will be affected. The hampering effects of state action upon economic prosperity will, therefore, be localised and minimalised in a world of deconsolidated, small states. In a world of much larger states and state institutions, however, the introduction of a tax will affect everyone; the introduction of a new regulation will affect everyone, everywhere at all times regardless of their own needs and preferences; and the introduction of a border tariff will affect the trade of everybody who wishes to trade across the lines of the large, unified state. Hence the hampering effects of state taxes and regulations and infringements upon private property are magnified as the state becomes larger. This is not all, however, for the incentives to tax, regulate and otherwise infringe private property rights are much greater in a large, unified state than in smaller states. Smaller states are, by their nature, economically weaker than larger states and are more reliant upon maintaining the free flow of goods and services from abroad which simply cannot be produced with the resources at home. Each state will therefore compete with all other states to attract foreign investment and the unhindered import and export of goods and services by minimising taxes, regulation and border tariffs. Because the jurisdiction of a small state covers only a small area, if its rates of taxation, regulation and border tariffs are relatively high then investment will simply flee to a more competitive jurisdiction which may be only tens of miles away and the standard of living in the small state will plummet. A large state, however, whose jurisdiction covers a larger territory and possesses access to a larger number of domestic resources has no such incentive to keep its tax and regulatory burdens to the minimum. With more domestic wealth and resources available and with the threat of capital fleeing for foreign shores thousands of miles away minimised, large states are free to increase their tax and regulatory predations to a much higher degree than smaller states. One of the supposed benefits of the EU is the so-called common market – the notion that goods and workers may move freely under a single tax and regulatory code. Yet any benefits achieved by having to deal with a single code are likely to be outweighed by its gargantuan size whereas a myriad of small and trifling tax and regulatory codes in a world of greater state division is likely to be a better condition for promoting trade and prosperity. Indeed, former UKIP/Independent MEP Godfrey Bloom has referred to the EU as a “customs union” rather than a market union – in other words, a single bureaucracy rather than a single market, a chance for the state to stamp out the irritating competition between states which forces them to keep their tax and regulatory rates low (as demonstrated recently in the EU’s disagreement over the rate of tax Apple had agreed to pay to the Irish government) and replace it instead with a giant socialistic paradise of government control. Instead of emphasising the “unionisation” of tax rules and regulations, those who wish to encourage economic prosperity should instead concentrate on reducing them – and the only way to do this is to make the state entities which impose them smaller and weaker, not bigger and stronger.

The argument for the “unity” and the consolidation of states becomes even more absurd when we consider the desire to preserve peace and prevent war. Murders are committed by murderers; rapes are committed by rapists; thefts are committed by thieves. If we want to minimise the effects of murders, rapes and thefts then it is obvious that the last thing we want is for all of the murderers, rapists and thieves to join together under the banner of “unity” so they are free to combine their powers to murder, rape and steal to a greater degree with increasing ingenuity. Similarly, wars are started by states and are fought between states. Therefore, if we wish to minimise wars and their effects then it follows that we need to make states smaller and weaker; it makes no sense whatsoever to make them bigger and stronger. The argument that unifying states is likely to prevent wars seems to rest on the assumption that government is the glue that holds society together and it is in fact all of the people whom they govern who are the cause of endless conflict. Thus a bigger and powerful government is able to “unite” all of these people and stop them from fighting each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the fact that, as libertarians, we know that the state’s dependence upon force and violence for its wellbeing renders it an institution that is bound to inflict rather than prevent conflict, bigger and more powerful states are the enablers of bigger and more destructive conflicts rather than our salvagers from them. Private actors and institutions are necessarily splintered, decentralised and reliant upon voluntary trade for their sustenance. Tiny states have equally tiny tax bases from which they can command a very limited number of resources. The ability of such persons and institutions to start and sustain wars is extremely limited. Large states, on the other hand, are vast concentrations of wealth and power which not only have enormous tax bases from which to draw the means to fund eminently more destructive firepower but the advent of central banking – another creature of centralisation and “unity” – has allowed large states to fund their conflicts through monetary inflation rather than through demanding their citizens to cough up directly. So does anyone sensibly argue that private actors and small states would achieve the level of carnage and destruction that the large and powerful belligerents managed to reach in the two world wars? Does anyone believe that a decentralised world of small states and private institutions would have had the ability to force us to endure a generation and a half of potential nuclear terror during the cold war as the vast territories of the US and the Soviet Union managed to do? The most spectacular terrorist atrocity (i.e. an attack by non-state actors) of the past generation – the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 – killed just fewer than 3000 people, a figure which, while undoubtedly tragic, stands in the shadow of the more than 1 million Iraqis who have died as a result of the US invasion of their country. There would, of course, be fewer states left to fight each other in a world of consolidated, centralised states. However, this completely ignores the fact that the states that remain are armed with a destructive ability far superior to any minor state or territory – and especially compared to any private criminal. Any conflicts in a decentralised world would be localised to small pinpoints on the world map, affecting, at most, a few thousand people and, with the participants lacking the resources to continue fighting and disrupting trade for too long, would probably be over in weeks if not days. Contrast this to the situation in which we languish today where the ridiculous cult of interventionism and “collective security” – another banner of “unity” – forces all such local conflicts to be escalated into drawn out, global catastrophes, as the forays into Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have demonstrated. It is clear that if we wish to preserve peace and prevent war then we need to prevent the institutions that start and fight wars – states – from becoming too big and powerful.

On a related note, there is a distinct air of utopianism in the minds of the centralisers and consolidators when it comes to the issue of preserving peace. War and conflict are doubtless terrible things and we would have a much better world if they did not exist. However, it is also true that, for as long as humans have walked the earth, individuals and institutions have run into conflicts with each other and that these conflicts have been escalated into violence. This is just human nature. Unwittingly, in trying to prevent all war everywhere and at any time by “unifying us” under the yoke of bigger and larger states, the advocates of such an approach have, instead, served to escalate the size and duration of wars and vastly magnify their destructive capabilities. The more sensible approach, we would suggest, is to acknowledge that war and conflict will always exist and to recognise that a superior social system will never eliminate these aspects of humanity entirely, just as in the same way libertarians do not expect a free market in private defence and security to ever completely eradicate murder, rape and theft. Our task instead is to find ways to reduce the frequency, duration and potency of these awful things as much as possible. When it comes to war only cutting the potential belligerents down to size and reducing their ability to wage destructive wars in the first place is likely to achieve this.

As we have seen, the liberating effects of decentralisation owe themselves to the relative weakness of deconsolidated and splintered states and state institutions. However, these liberating effects do not arise out of the smallness of the states and state institutions per se. Rather it is because the individual person becomes stronger relative to an institution the more decentralised and localised that institution is. Within his own immediate family, which may consist of only half a dozen people, an individual person’s needs and views are likely to be highly influential upon the other members of the family. They will attempt to provide for and accommodate these views and needs as an active part of their lives simply because the individual is close to them both physically and emotionally. An individual will have a little less influence in his immediate community or on a civil or parish council, where there are more people involved and few of them will be as familiar with him as his immediate family. However he would clearly have more influence in such a circle than in an entire town or city. And once, of course, we get to the level of an entire country such as Great Britain, a diverse nation of various economic, social and ethnic backgrounds, a single person’s lonely vote in, say, a general election becomes a drop in the ocean along with all of the other c. 45 million votes that are eligible to be cast. And if a country such as Britain was to be absorbed into a superstate such as the EU an individual may be drowned out by a chorus of 500 million other voices. The larger an institution becomes then the more its ability to focus on the “micro” issues that really affect people’s lives is progressively diminished and is replaced by a concentration on “macro” or global issues, the successful tackling of which is determined not by the wellbeing of individual people but, rather, by the measurement of aggregated statistics. So whereas, say, a family will care about whether Dad has a job that he enjoys and pays enough to feed and house the family or whether Grandma can get her hip operation in a hospital local enough for her to travel to, large state governments will instead care about GDP and the size of hospital waiting lists. Whereas a local council might focus on whether there is a sufficient bus service to a small community or whether a particular street is clear of litter, large governments, instead, have transport and environmental policies. Who in the bureaucracy is likely to care whether these policies might overlook the specific needs of one community or street some hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the capital? More local institutions are also likely to be populated more homogenously, with each person experiencing relatively similar priorities and holding a relatively similar worldview. Thus the ability to induce empathy between those who lead and those who are led is much more likely and, indeed, may produce more of a situation of symbiosis, or a sense of “working together” to further common goals as opposed to the “command and follow” routine of large states. In other words, even though a particular institution may still function officially through the methods of power and force, the smaller and more localised it is then the more likely such an institution will approach the individual and his needs in a voluntary and peaceful manner – or at least relatively so compared to much larger, faceless state institutions. Even the socialisation of property – considered to be the antithesis of libertarians, or at least right-leaning libertarians – is less likely to be a problem in, say, a small, voluntary commune where all of the commune’s members can air their views as to how their collective resources should be put to use and where all the members are likely to share a common motivation and purpose. Yet a similar exercise on a nationwide scale has always proven to be a disaster – not to mention, of course, that is easier for someone to leave a small commune than it was to leave, say, the Soviet Union.

It is important to realise that decentralisation is not necessarily about breaking every institution down into its smallest possible parts just for the sake of it. There is nothing wrong with large entities or institutions if such sizes generate advantages that could not otherwise be attained. Rather, the primary purpose of decentralisation is to devolve decision making authority (or what might be called “sovereignty”) to its the lowest possible level and that the closer this is to the individual then the more liberating the decentralising effect will be. So there is nothing wrong with lots of individuals or small institutions deciding to form a large institution to achieve a common purpose. This is precisely what individuals do when they form companies and joint enterprises. Whatever criticism we might hurl at the inadequacy of corporate governance and executive dominance, it is still basically the case that the individual shareholder of such an entity can liquidate his position if he wishes to disassociate himself from the institution. Thus the ultimate fate of the institution is dependent upon the willingness of individuals to continue its existence rather than upon its own volition. When, however, such an institution, which may originally have been organised voluntarily, becomes the ultimate decision making authority – like the modern state has become – and is able to prevent its component parts from exercising any significant autonomous power that would seal its fate, then the anti-liberating effects of consolidation and centralisation will be felt. This has been the case with the United States which, having started off as an association of small, independent, sovereign states has become, at least since the American Civil War, a compulsory union with the power concentrated in Washington DC rather than in the state capitals.

Decentralisation cannot depend solely upon formal, constitutional arrangements or treaties and it is naïve to argue that such set ups are adequate. What matters is where the de facto ability to enforce decision making power lies. An individual shareholder has de facto power over a company, for instance, because a court will enforce the sale of his shares and whatever other rights he may have. Technically, the individual member states of the EU remain wholly sovereign nations and, indeed, are so at this present time – the perceived loss of sovereignty of which its citizens complain has come in part from the fact that the politicians of the individual state governments have been happy to haemorrhage more and more powers to Brussels that override the individual, local needs of each country. However, if all of the military, policing and judicial might of the combined EU member states was to be consolidated in Brussels – which is, of course, the eventual aim of the super-statists – then it would be the case that no individual member state would retain the ability to enforce its sovereignty over the larger entity. Hence, it was a good thing for the UK to vote to leave the EU before such a consolidation occurred. What matters for the process of decentralisation and its liberating effects, therefore, is that any legal or enforcement system must be able to give effect to the decision making authority of smaller and smaller institutions. Therefore, large, standing armies, and consolidated police forces and judicial systems run from vast buildings in the capitals of large states, such as the Pentagon in Washington DC, are the biggest fears for those of us who wish to achieve a world of liberty – and with it, a world of peace and prosperity.